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maladaptive-ninja-returns · 4 years

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It’s The Avengers (03x10)

Loki x Reader Avengers The Office AU (Slowwwwww Burn)

Season 3 Episode 10: Safehouse

Series Summary: Living in the Avengers facility post-apocalypse in a better timeline Tony Stark has decided to capture every moment by pulling The Office on the Avengers. All of housemates are pretty used to the idea except for you, who had just come here to finish her degree, and the newest member- Loki.

Warnings: soft moments

Word Count: It is an achievement to get this chapter out. Imma celebrate it. Oh fanfic Gods! Give me the power!

MASTERLIST in bio, darlings. Tags are open (check bio)

The camera only had space made up with the galactic beauty swirling in deepest green that can put the stars to shame. The black hole seemed to become bigger as the camera has decided to use a snail's pace to zoom out, giving the audience quite the treat into the pool seems to disappear and reappear under the pale lids with unsurprisingly long lashes. Those veritable brows are wrinkled- enough to make one concerned but not enough to force someone to come and sit next to him with an ice-cream sundae as Peter did once- as if wondering something under their hypothetical breaths. The camera panned out more to show those thin lips going thinner, almost into one nearly invisible line. A long breath is drawn in and those long white fingers are made to rest on his chin as he looks up into an endless void and even Javier- who is being recorded by the other tiny drone- is thinking some stuff. The camera panned out further to show him half lying on the pilot seat while his legs rested on the cargo box behind, away from the controls. A true piece of art.

Javier: *signs as he points to his tablet with Loki's live feed* this God could be a fucking model. *fans himself*

It wasn't long before his voice broke the silence. "Maybe it is the food," he contemplates for the room where his only audience is a busy fur-baby licking his nethers. "Or maybe it was the people on Knowhere. Or it was just that...dingy old-" Loki's casually furry brows were now carrying a full frown- "lair. I don't know." The sigh the left his lungs was loud enough to reach to the back while he lifted his legs to ground himself and droop into his own lap, running his hands through his nearly greasy hair. When was the last time he washed them? "Why is she mad, Lulu?" Loki groans, trying to massage his head to get something out of it. Lulu, on the other hand, decided this was the best time to lie upside down and play with the one blue firefly that got stuck in their ship while they were leaving Knowhere. "Why has she locked herself back there?" He raised his head and asked some invisible force before looking at Javier's camera.

Loki: I'm not concerned for her *pretends to shrug* I just *blinks* don't want my ship to be flooded with her tears. Humans just have the tendency to go all out with their hurt and pain unlike some of us. *camera zooms in to his face* *resting bitch face on* Tell a word about this to her and I will cut you.

A click of something in the back immediately heightened Loki's senses to make his elbow slip from the chair, making him look for support long enough to pose in the chair with the nearest piece of reading material like a man lost in a completely different world, doing an award-worthy job of pretending to not see you come in. "Do we have some sort of digestive tablets on board?" Your hoarse voice asked while barely looking around the space. "I feel bloated. It's fucking disgusting." The groan you let out made Lulu sit up and tilt his head in your direction with his fur standing straight on his back. Loki tsked, still not looking up from the catalogue of the best sex robots on the market in Knowhere. "I told you not to eat those Cheese Puffs on Know-" "OH MY FUCKING GOD!!" Your rage-filled outburst caught the god by surprise, making him jolt up enough to be caught by the camera for the amusement of a certain group of people hungry for entertainment. "THosE FUckING chEEse puFFs wOn'T do me as much damage as your BICKERING!!!" The painful frustration that left your lungs made Javier's eyes go wide. Loki turned to look at the camera in pure confusion.

Loki: *a glorious frown on his face* *arms crossed* *bites lower lip* *inhales* *raises finger* maybe she is sexually frustrated? Space can no human touch can do that to you. And she clearly hasn't watched porn since we teleported *scoffs lightly* *rolls eyes* thank Valhalla for that. I no longer have to hear those filthy noises from across the wa- *stops mid-sentence when a mug comes flying to hit him in the head* "Pervert," you call from out of the frame while Loki ruffles his hair to remove the shards of ceramic caught in there. Loki: Okay *stares at the camera* maybe she's not sexually frustrated. *pauses with his lips still apart* *camera pans in* unless this tantrum is a human way of getting my atten- *another mug comes flying*

"Okay," Loki spun around in his chair to put the ship in full throttle for a destination only he knew about, "that's it. I did not want it to come to this but we are landing here." The camera spun to you and your crinkled brows. "We are supposed to get back your juice, man. Stop making unwanted pit-stops." Lulu's camera caught the disgust on Loki's face as he closed his eyes and shook his head lightly. "Stop saying that." "What?" You crossed your arms across your chest, narrowing your eyes while glaring at the back of his head. "Your juice?" "It's my essence." "But it is your juice. You took it out and now you want to put it back in." "The essence was extracted out of me and I need to consume it-" "You know that sounds worse, right?" "..." "Don't worry, baby, we'll get your bad bitch juice." "It's NOT a ju-why am I even arguing." "Because it's a turn on," you muttered under your breath before sitting down with Lulu in your lap and tying your seat belt. "What?" Loki turned his head around. "Nothing." Innocent as ever.

Loki: I think she's forgetting I have good ears. *narrows eyes and puckers his lips*

You: Oh I know he has super-hearing. That's why I leave my laptop on a decent volume with some classic porno on whenever I'm mad at him. *shrugs and leans back in the chair* *camera pans in on your smirk*

On a Planet Unknown The cameras took in the expanse of the barren planet the group had landed on. The ground seemed to have been hit with a drought. There were small hills in the distance and a few craters scattered all over. The star of this solar system shone too far, bright with pink hues on its tails, making everything drown in a tinge of blush. It was hard to miss this strange sentiment on Loki's face. A mixture of nostalgia with a side of something sour. He breathed in this atmosphere, closing his eyes to reminisce something the others did not have a clue about. A serene smile painted on his lips while his skin reflected the baby pink hues with delicate softness. Javier, talented with his work, used his hovering little drone cam to slowly and cautiously pan in on Loki's face, being really patient on the controls in his hands. "So this is where your juice is?" The zooming in stopped as Loki's eyes opened, blinked twice and sighed some of his internal frustration out. "My-" you could see the boiling lines of frustration on his face while Javier caught the suppressed delight on yours- "juice...is not here." "Then why are we here?" "To get rid of you-" You whipped your head faster than he could finish. "-r grey clouds." Suspicion fresh on your face, you waited for him to continue. "When I'd fallen into the wormhole after my... alleged demise, this was the first place I discovered after a series of misfortunes," Loki exhaled, looking at clean nothingness in front of them. It was not much but Javier zoomed in your face that did a slow shift from the barren view to the sharp face that reflected nothing but a painful softness in those melodramatic hues. "This-" your voice was softer than you wanted it to be- "was your...safehouse?" Loki inhaled and turned to give you a thoughtful look. "In some ways, yes." The hints of smile that were on Loki's face seemed to question the expression on your face as your lips parted in slight horror before he was witnessing you jump away from something and right into his arms with a scream. "Something touched my foot!!!" No one really told Javier to focus on a specific genre yet there he was, letting his camera do a slow-mo on the way Loki's arm came to the rescue of your waist, holding you steady. And close to him. Javier neither missed the frantic grasp of Loki's black shirt under his overcoat by your hands as you turned around to watch what menace had bothered to make you their next victim.

Javier: *signing* I do not know how to activate Lulu's stomach music otherwise I would have added a cheesy track too. *smiles* *somewhere on Earth a boy forgets to breathe*

"Relax," Loki soothed you as he looked down at the familiar purple and pink light crawling up through the cracks in the ground, "here. Look." He did not push you away, in fact, he held you just as he did while you followed his gaze to look at seedling sprouting through the ground and growing leaves and a bud right in front of you in real-time; the bonus being the glow-in-the-dark veins and petals that shone purple and pink. A muted 'Woah' left your lungs while Lulu examined the little plant, tapping at it with his paw to be amused by the ripple he created in the bioluminescent flora. Loki leaned a little closer to your ear while you were still gawking at the plant next to your feet. "Look up," he whispered. "Huh?" Your eyes instantly went away from the plant towards the field that now had an abundance of these flowers while trees grew at a distance carrying the same effect in their leaves- with purple fire trapped inside them. "What the hell is this place?!" You could barely breathe. Loki, on the other hand, was having a gala time at the expense of your expressions. "There was once a...lets say a conscious planet that went by the name Ego. Ego created an ecosystem that would survive in the absence of a star and when in the presence of it, it would camouflage itself to keep the biome intact, because, you know, greedy neighbours, bad rocks, invading aliens, yada yada." You look at the camera to shake your head. "What you are standing on right now is a chunk of that ecosystem." You looked around once again. "So, this thing was bigger than what it is now?" Loki was delighted by your interest. "Yes. It was ten times the size of the earth. And-" he added with such a gush of stress that you were scared he was going to burst any moment- "it had dinosaurs."

You: *guffaws* Haha! Nerd!

Loki: *suspiciously stared at the camera* What. I have interests too, you judgy clots. *somewhere outside the frame you softly shout 'It's thots!'* Yes. *does not waver his gaze from the camera* That.

"Damn! I could live in this place forever!" Loki narrowed his eyes in slight discomfort. "Weeeellll-" The camera cut to you looking like you saw a ghost. "EGO WAS PETER QUILL'S DAD????!!!!!" You shout right into the frame before your body freezes and the shock disappears into a blank slate. "Wait a second..." The camera was already turning to Loki who was shaking his head and whispering to himself, "She went there."

You: *confusion level: the white guy who went to India instead of Indiana* How did Quill's parent even have sex?!! *camera pans in on the gasp that escapes you* Tentacles! *the camera pans out to show Loki standing next to you with he arms crossed across his chest* Loki: *tired* Pervert.

"This is a dead rock with the remnant prints of Ego," he continued, "Come, let's go inside." Saying that he started to walk in some random direction according to you while bringing his hand for you to take. Your eyes went from those long fingers open and waiting for you before looking at the back of his head. A step more from him and you rushed your hand to take his, wrapping your fingers carefully around his palm. The camera was quick to catch your free hand going for the back of your ear, scratching some itch while silently walking some distance with the God. "Wh-" you cleared the vibrating disturbance in your throat- "where are we going?" "Just a few more steps." And true to his words, a few steps later, Loki stopped, making you pause right next to him. Letting go of your hand- something that made you grip those fingers in the other hand, trying to wring them dry of secrets only you knew- to feel something in the space in front of him with his palm. And when he did, he grabbed the space and yanked it back, revealing the space to give way to a cottage. A small, dark, probably comfy cottage. In the middle of nowhere. Covered in glowing purple moss. While you stood there gaping at the incomprehensible science happening in front of you, Loki undid the padlock on the front door to open and enter first. "Stay outside till I tell you to come in," he ordered, not realising you were too engrossed in the exterior architecture of this little house to listen to him. Javier sent one of his drones inside while waiting outside with you. "Dude!" You exhaled while punching Javier on his arm, "this is heaven!!!" Turning the camera to face him, Javier looked at it and signed 'is it though?'. "Alright, come in," Loki's voice called for you from inside. "Hiding your porn stash, Loki?" you stated quite rhetorically before the camera found you frozen at the entrance of what looked like a living room. And your eyes stuck on Loki's face softly illuminated by the blue-ish purple flames captured inside a foot long lamp in the shape of a cuboid. You stood there in a ten-second daze, your eyes stuck on the face that worked meticulously with four more similar lamps before turning to look at you, immediately making you throw your gaze at the lamps. "Nice lights," you stated, a little louder than usual, clearly confused by your own pitch. Loki walked around the place, hanging the lamps to help light up the cottage, allowing you, the cameras and Lulu to explore the place more freely. The cottage felt more spacious on the inside. There was a sofa facing a window where you stood, a small but decent workstation behind it next to the wall with small tools stacked by the size and category. The walls were decorated with a league of tools that only Loki knew about. "Is that a Ghili suit?" you had to ask. "Yes," Loki answered without looking from the kitchen, "and no, you cannot try it on." You tsked and Loki smiled. "So-" you clapped your hands and walked around casually, letting your legs stretch with each step- "where the beds at." Loki turned to face you, taking a step towards you, holding his arm up to take the support of the ceiling as he leaned in to get his face close to yours. Javier- clever as ever- zoomed in at the bulge of Loki's bicep wanting to get free of the lone t-shirt that barely got to see the light of the day with that unexplainably fashionable overcoat. There was a split second where the camera looked at Lulu scratching away at the sofa in the living room, drawing his attention with a click and gesturing something out of the frame to make the little furball pause the massacre for a few seconds before pressing his stomach.

Can't Keep My Eyes Off You Lo-Fi version starts playing through Lulu's stomach.

"There are no beds here, darling," Loki cooed with his signature smirk right in your face. "There is only a bed." Your composure might have slipped for a second with his model-like posture but you had seen enough fuckboys in your life to deal with the God's sense of play. "Oh," you stressed sullenly while taking off your jacket and throwing it on the couch over Lulu, "guess we'll have to make do with what we have." You knew your puppy dog eyes won't do much on this creature but that slight distortion in his gaze when he blinked to look down at your sweaty tank top before coming back to your face was worth it all.

You: *chuckling* no matter where they come from they are all horny at some point under it all, aren't they?! *looks away from the lens at Javier* Hmm? *mocking a laugh* What? I was just joking with him. That's how friends joke with each other. *glares at Javier with the smile still smacked on your face* Don't read into it. *camera swerves to show Javier sign* Javier: Will Mr Stark think this as a joke? Just asking? *camera swerves back to the one-eighty your expression does* You: Oh, he'll kill him.

Back On Earth "Ooooh, Tony's gonna murder that punk." Sam's crackling whisper was followed by nods and hums from Peter, Scott and Wanda. Vision was the only one who tilted his head in deep thought. "Is it because Loki held Y/N's hand and holding one's hand shows a sign of affection?" "Yes, our big robot baby," Scott sang while feeding Vision another popcorn. "But Wanda and Natasha hold hands too. But it seems absurd for me to get mad at that," the AI continued while Wanda chuckled. "Wanda and Natasha holding hands is akin to two sisters holding hands," Scott explained, "and that's the only concept we will go with if we all like our necks intact." All the boys agreed. "Now Loki, on the other hand, is seen as a threat by Tony because Y/N, his daughter, is young and still a baby in his eyes whom he wants to protect at all costs. While Loki- thanks to his chiselled looks and accurately hot manners- seems like the boy no father would want their daughter to date. Because a man like that takes seconds to make a girl fall in love with him. Look at the dude. Look at the bod. And that's when he is wearing clothes on clothes on clothes. No wonder Tony wouldn't want him within a hundred feet of his daughter." Now, everyone was looking at a sighing Scott giving heart eyes to Loki on the screen. The camera turned to show a previously busy-with-her-nails Natasha pausing to look at the Ant-Man and wonder. "You are in love with Loki." "Head over heels, woman," Scott smiled without looking away from the screen. "Tell me one thing," Peter asked out of curiosity while chewing on the popcorn, "you learned the word 'akin' today, didn't you?" "It was the word of the day on dictionary.com," he replied without missing a beat.

Space Farm Safehouse One of Javier's camera had followed you up the attic, while you went looking for a place to hang your wet clothes. Unlike the eerie space shown in the movies, this one was spacious, had an entire wall with a window and a sofa set in the direction to enjoy the view of the flora sparkling outside. Putting your clothes on what looked like a wooden chair in the corner, you sat down on the sofa, eyes stuck on the view outside. The camera rotated to capture the wave of purple embers riding the plants and the cracks of the ground. The camera watched you inhale when steps were heard coming up the stairs, a figure out of focus walking behind you, disappearing to let you feel the cushion dip next to you. "Feels one hell of a place hide from the world," you whispered, never blinking for the fear of missing it all. La vie en rose Louis Armstrong but it's raining Loki chuckled. "Who hurt you?" The playful grin on Loki's face turned to ash when he turned and watched you sniffle while huge tears fell from your eyes. The God's face knew a new type of fear when he turned to the camera.

Loki: *raises his hands in defence* I swear upon my own self I meant it as a joke. *looks at the camera* Tony, if you are seeing this, it was a joke.

"Why does it hurt so much?" You sobbed while your eyes never once stopped the tap that had been set free. "Even after so many years, why do all those old memories hurt so much?" Loki did open his mouth to say something but nothing came out. He brought his hand forward to keep it on your shoulder but stopped short, taking it up to your head before receding his hand back to himself. "W-" "I am having a good day and suddenly I cannot stop thinking about the time my mom ripped all my drawing because she wanted me to do something more 'productive'. It's been, what, twelve years and that stupid memory is fucking me up today." By this time you were ugly crying, trying to stop your snot from coming out of your nose. Loki shuffled where he sat, finally bringing his hand up to let his fingers touch your head. "There, there," he sputtered, the pain of embarrassment bright on his face. "Loki I-uh-I am sooo sorry!" You bawled, clearly confusing the God even more. "You don't have to be s-" "I met Frigga on Knowhere," you stated between your tears and jerks, making him pause where he sat. "And obviously she was supposed to meet you but got stuck with me for some reason. And then before we could come to you, I asked her if she was the good guy, you know. To make sure she was not going to hurt you. And she was super sweet and she smiled at me and then disappeared and I am so sorry you were not able to meet her because of me." It felt like ages passed when Loki blinked and brought himself to the current space and time. His brows furrowed and his iris seemed to open wide in some heavy revelation. "Is that why you have been struggling since we left Knowhere?" You sniffled and took the white rag that came out of frame, making the camera pan out to watch Lulu sitting by your feet ready with another rag for you. No one knew where he got them from. "Is this why you did not talk to me the entire trip?" You nodded before blowing your nose into the rag and tossing it into the basket kept in the corner. Loki sighed. "Y/N." He scooched closer to you, taking your shoulders to turn you towards him."Look at me." You did. "My mother disappearing on you is not your fault." You whimpered, forcing him to move each of his hand from your shoulder to your face, his fingers running the length, allowing his palm to anchor itself over your jaw. "Frigga was a Witch. And she was no ordinary Witch. If she found a way to meet you even after her death then I am confident that she will find a way to meet me too. Okay?" He waited for an answer. The camera panned in to look at your tear-smeared face nod in between his hands. "Now I want you to tell me something-" he sang soothingly being as gentle with his words as with those hands still stuck on your face- "did these old memories come up after you met her?" That guilty puppy look you gave him confirmed some fear of his. He said something under his breath that sounded like an alien curse. Almost drooping with his eyes closed, he pulled himself back to face you. "I'm sorry you had to go through that, Y/N." He let his thumb stroke your cheek, neither of you realising how you leaned into his touch. "I think there is something else that made me go through it," you muttered through your hoarse throat. Loki simply nodded. "I think I'm about to start my-" "Period," Loki finished your sentence, sighing and taking his hands away from your face to let one arm move around your shoulder. "I know. I could hear your uterus howling on the ship." You adjusted yourself on the couch to bring your legs up and rest your head on his shoulder. "That must be quite scary for you, hearing my insides like that." "Ehh," Loki answered, looking at the scenery outside while meteors passed through the sky, lighting up when entering the atmosphere, "not as scary when your intestines growling before you let all the air out of your syste-ow!" "It's gas! It's normal. Get over it, you twat!" The sound of his chuckle reverberated throughout the cottage. Lulu slept at the foot of the couch while the two of you talked some more till sleep took over one and the other found a blanket to cover you and let your rest. "Let's find some cure for this bloody situation in the morning," Loki whispered to your snoring figure; finding himself sitting the foot of the sofa for a few more minutes before letting his hand pat your head a few times. Two pats and he moved his hand away, watching the camera entering the space. "What are you looking at?" he softly threw in Javier's direction, getting up and walking past him. "Go to sleep. I'll wake you up just with the first rays."

The Lounge "Oof! These idiots 'bout to fall in love." The camera zoomed out to show Rhodey sipping his morning coffee while Peter and Scott slept over each other on the couch, snoring quite loud while Zuko licked Peter's face while standing on the armrest. Rhodey looked at the duo, judging them and their will to sit there for more than twenty-four hours. "You guys are lucky Tony has another daughter to think about right now." He tsked and turned back to the TV, muttering 'fangirls' under his breath before walking away to get a refill.

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tails89 · 3 years

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Aliit ori'shya tal'din

Family is more than blood

Fandom: The Mandalorian

Word count: 3700

No pairings

Summary: Din didn’t usually spare much through for annual holidays, Life Day included. There wasn’t much point when one spent most of their time travelling through the vast void of space where days were a monotonous streak of pitch black and starlight.

This year, there is a reason to celebrate.

Read it on AO3

***

It’s the insistent warning from the fuel gauge that forces Din to find somewhere to land. They’ve been traveling for a week, jumping from one quadrant to the next, never coming out of hyperspeed long enough to do much more than input the next set of coordinates and jump again.

Taking out Moff Gideon was supposed to solve their problems but they were yet to reap the rewards. Din can only hope that as word of the Moff’s demise continues to circulate, the hunters who still hold trackers will come to realise there is no longer any payout at the end. Until then, Din and the kid will need to keep moving—until they can be safe.

There’s also the matter of the Jedi.

He’d almost let the Jedi take Grogu after defeating Moff Gideon. The kid needs training. That much is certain, but Din isn’t ready to hand the little womp rat over to someone who may not have the kid’s best interests at heart. The Jedi, Luke, had given Din the coordinates to his school and an invitation to see it for himself. Din plans to take him up on that offer, but not yet.

The alarm whines again, the shrill sound set’s Din’s teeth on edge as he silences it. He misses that about Razor Crest. It had been old, but reliable and he’d known exactly how far he could stretch a full tank of fuel. There are too many things about this new ship that just don’t feel right. The galley is set up in a similar configuration as the old one, but the shelves are just a half step across, and Din has not yet learned to duck.

There’s a noise behind him in the cockpit—the soft patter of tiny feet and a high-pitched coo before a tug on his cloak draws Din’s attention down.

Grogu stares up at him with his large, expressive eyes.

“You want to help me find a place to refuel?”

He lifts the kid up to sit on his lap and drops them out of hyperspace. The kid watches with wide eyes as the long streaks of starlight condense into pinpricks of light.

“Alright.” Flicking up the map, Din presses a button on the console and their location blinks back at them. “This is us.”

The kid reaches for the hologram, one three-fingered hand stretching towards the flashing lights. The other clutches his newest toy—Din hasn’t worked it where it came from, but it’s definitely part of the ship.

Search the nearby planets, Din finds one that meets their requirements.

“Mirador,” he says out loud for the kid’s benefit. “It’s only a few hours away. Quiet, no known Imperial bases. What do you think?”

Grogu coos in agreement, at least, Din decides to take it is agreement. The kid understands more that it seems and is generally pretty good at getting his point across despite the language barrier. He plugs in the coordinates and stands, scooping the child out of his lap. If all goes smoothly and with out fuss, there’s enough time to feed his kid and catch up on a few hours sleep before Din needs to pilot the ship down the to the planet’s surface.

***

“Let’s see what we’ve got in here.”

Din set’s Grogu down on the bench and moves through the narrow space of the galley. They’re completely out of fresh food and Din makes a mental note to restock while they’re down on the planet, before looking at their dry rations. Before finding the child, Din had never been too fussed about eating. It was a necessity for survival, but he’d never taken any particular pleasure from the act. With another mouth to feed—a surprisingly picky mouth considering the things Din had seen swallowed whole—he’d had to expand his options.

Pulling one of the ration bars from the cupboard, Din tears open the packaging and starts breaking it down into smaller chunks, dividing the bar between two cups. Without anything to add to it, the soup will be rather bland, but it has all the nutrients and will be filling.

Carefully adding hot water, Din stirs until the chunks have dissolved, then adds cold water to the smaller cup to bring the temperature down.

“Sorry kiddo,” he says, pushing the cup towards Grogu. “It’s just for one meal. I’ll resupply when we land.”

The kid clutches at the cup, but makes no move to drink, his ears drooping in disappointment at the brown liquid.

“Come on,” Din reasons. “It’s not that bad.” He picks up his soup, lifting his helmet just high enough the raise the cup to his lips. “See?” He says, moving around the end of the bench. “Your turn.”

He passes the end of the shelving, just narrowly remembering to duck his head this time.

The kid giggles and finally drinks.

***

The new ship doesn’t have a sleeping compartment. The Razor Crest hadn’t had one either when Din had first come into possession of it— he’d repurposed a storage cupboard, fitting it out with a mattress and eventually turning it into something almost comfortable.

The new ship has an alcove. It’s not much more than a deep corner where two walls meet, but it’s out of the way, directly under the cockpit and half shielded by the ladder. It can’t be closed off the way the old compartment could, but until Din starts collecting bounties again, it’ll do.

Sitting on the warn mattress, Din starts pulling off his boots. He doesn’t remove all of his armour, just enough to sleep comfortably—the pauldrons, belt, and chest plate— and programs his vambrace to wake him just before they leave hyperspace.

The kid watches him throughout this little ritual, tucked away in his own little nest-bed, his large dark eyes blinking drowsily.

Finally ready to sleep, Din hesitates, his fingers flexing beside his head. After defeating Gideon and rescuing the child, Din had shown Grogu his face. After coming so close the losing the kid, he’d wanted to look at him with his own two eyes, to reassure himself that this was real.

He’d taken to sleeping without his helmet once they’d gone off on their own. Each time he removes it, it gets a little easier, but he’s still learning to reconcile his childhood lessons of the creed and the Re’solnare, and what he’s seen and learned in the last few weeks.

The helmet comes of with a soft hiss and Din sets in on the floor beside his boots. He lies back and closes his eyes, silently counting down in his head. Like clockwork, just as he reaches zero there is a shuffling as Grogu abandons his bed for Din’s.

He shouldn’t encourage it, but the separation had been hard on them both, so instead of sending him back to bed, Din lifts his arm so his kid can burrow in closer.

***

The vibration of his vambrace wakes Din a few hours later.

Careful not to wake the child, he sits up, tugging on his boots and reattaching his armour.

With his helmet tucked under one arm, he climbs the ladder to the cockpit, taking his seat in the pilot’s chair just as the bright streaks of starlight wink out as they leave hyperspace.

Up in the distance, the planet Mirador looms.

The beeping of fuel gauge is insistent now, Din shuts it off with the flick of a switch—he doesn’t need the reminder. The planet is in range and there’s just enough fuel to land—though it will be close.

He disengages the autopilot and locks in on the refueling station he’d scanned earlier. As he approaches the planet, his comms burst to life and he is assigned a bay to land in.

Grogu is awake when Din steps off the ladder. No doubt the loud clanking of the fuel line being attached woke him. He stares up from Din’s bed and voices his disapproval.

“Time to get up, we need to get moving.” Din scoops him up, ignoring the way the child goes limp in an effort to avoid being picked up. Grogu is a fairly easy-going child, despite everything that has happened to him, but he is a child and like some of the younger children back at the covert, prone to the occasional tantrum. Din can only hope this sour mood isn’t building to that.

“You know you can’t stay here,” Din says, carrying Grogu over to the weapons locker to grab his blaster. The kid whines, cranky and still half-asleep. “I know kiddo, but it’s not going to happen.”

He punches in the code to open the locker, ignoring the weapon that hangs beside the blaster—that was another problem Din wasn’t ready to deal with—and holsters the gun before resecuring the locker.

The next challenge is deciding how to carry Grogu.

Mirador’s distance from the nearby sun means that it is covered in snow and ice for the majority of its solar year. The days are short and frigid and Din’s usual method of carrying Grogu in his arms or in a satchel are not going to cut it in this weather.

He fashions a sling by cutting strips from a spare blanket and tying it around his waist. He has to take his cloak off to secure the sling, but once he’s done, he can pull the heavy material of his cloak around them both to stay warm.

When he’s ready, he hits the release for the ramp.

The kid burrows down further into the sling at the first blast of icy air that blows through the hold. Din wraps the cloak tighter around them and steps out into the snow. The heater in his suit helps to keep the frigid air at bay as they make their way towards the market town.

The child settles down after a few minutes, the slow rise and fall of his back against the cloak suggesting he’s asleep.

Good, Din thinks. He can’t imagine anything worse than shopping in the cold with a fussy child and in all honesty, the kid could use the extra sleep. They both could. Between the frequent resetting of their course and the constant vigilance since leaving Moff Gideon’s light cruiser, decent sleep has been few and far between.

The town, when they reach it, is brightly lit against the gloomy weather. The stalls are all outside, but they are each set up with large glowing heaters to keep people, and the wares, from freezing.

Din starts at one of the larger shopfronts, purchasing what he needs to restock the ship. They’re low on most things, the ship having been little more than a shell when it came into his possession, but in a town this small he’ll only be able to find the basic necessities. Fruit and vegetables are almost prohibitively expensive on a planet of Mirador’s type, but the meat seems reasonable.

Once he’s handed over an outrageous number of credits, Din gives instructions for delivery and moves on. He wanders from stall to stall with no real intention of purchasing anything else, just enjoying the opportunity to stretch his legs after a week on a cramped spaceship.

At some point, Din’s going to need to resume work. He’s got enough credits coming in from Dune and Karga to keep him and the kid fed, but he can’t live on their generosity forever. His conscience alone won’t let him. He needs to get back to what he knows, what he’s good at and earn money for the covert… once he finds them.

In the meantime, he’s happy enough to meander through the market. Many of the stalls are decorated and Din wonders if the planet has some local holiday approaching. He’s lost all sense of time in the last few weeks. It’s hard to measure the passage of days when speeding through the endless night of space.

As a Mandalorian he draws many stares as he walks, but the lump under his cloak goes unnoticed in the cold. He feels the child squirm against his chest just as his own stomach starts to rumble. He remembers passing a stall some time back selling hot food, so he doubles back to find it.

In the end, he follows his nose to the vendor roasting some sort of meat.

The Teltior woman looks up warily as he approaches, but Din is used to the stares his armour draws and just gestures for two of the skewers. Inside his cloak, Grogu shifts again, his clawed fingers skittering against the beskar.

“Don’t often see your kind on this planet, Mando,” she says conversationally as she turns the roasting meat on the grill. “Not here to cause trouble I hope.”

At the sound of another voice, Grogu coo’s something in response. Din tightens his hold on the edges of the cloak and shakes his head. “No trouble,” he says, raising his voice to cover the kid’s mumbling.

The Teltior’s eyes narrow slightly, but she doesn’t say anything else as she cooks. The scent of the roasting meat fills the air and kid makes a loud noise.

“Patience,” Din mutters under his breath, pressing one hand against the kid’s back in an effort to soothe him. He glances up, nervous, hoping the keep the child hidden but the noises from within his cloak become more insistent so Din lets the edges drop before his kid does something drastic, like use those Jedi powers of his.

The kid has his hands planted against the Mandalorian’s chest, twisting away to catch a glimpse of what’s going on behind him. With a silent sigh behind his mask, Din loosens the sling so that he can turn Grogu around and then refastens it.

The stallholder’s eyes go wide at the sight of the small green child, her eyes flicking from the kid up to Din’s helmet as she hands over the sticks of roasted meat and accepts the coins.

“Mine were like that,” she says, the suspicion gone from her tone, replaced with fond amusement. Her eyes are trained on the small green hand that’s come up, reaching for his lunch. “Like a nekarr cat the moment food was served. You’d think I never fed them.”

“Yeah, he uh- eats.” Din takes a half step back, ready to end the conversation and get back to the safety of their ship.

“He’s a cutie,” she continues blithely, leaning forward against the counter. “So, will this be your first Life Day with the little one?”

“Life Day?” His head jerks up, suddenly the decorations make sense. “Uh- yes?” He turns his attention down to the kid who is staring at the food, arms outstretched and grasping. He hands over one of the skewers and the kid immediately chomps down, babbling happily to himself.

“Cherish this moment,” she says. “They don’t stay this size forever. Next thing you know they’re grown and leaving home.”

***

After escaping the marketplace, Din wanders around looking for a secluded place the eat. He finds a sheltered spot behind a snowy outcrop and sits on the gnarled and folded trunk of a stunted tree.

While they eat, his thought’s drift back to the conversation with the stallholder.

Din didn’t usually spare much through for annual holidays, Life Day included. There wasn’t much point when one spent most of their time travelling through the vast void of space where days were a monotonous streak of pitch black and starlight.

He remembers celebrating the holiday as a child. The memories of his parents are faint and fleeting, the good times overshadowed by the grief of losing them.

Much more vivid, and welcome, are the memories with his buir and the clan—his aliit. It was a time for everyone to come together for good food and good cheer. The children would be given gifts and the adults would tell stories.

Din wants that for his kid.

He sits up sharply, eliciting a squeak from Grogu.

No, not his kid, he corrects silently, wondering when he started referring to Grogu as his in his head. He can’t afford to let himself think like that. As right as the word might feel, Din’s main priority needs to be returning Grogu to his kind—the Jedi.

He glances down at the kid, gnawing on the on the skewer. He’s a mess, his face and smock stained with meat juices. Wiping the worst of it from Grogu’s face, Din decides there’s not much else that can be done for it. They’ll just have to wait until they get back to the ship and he can find the kid a change of clothes.

But first—there’s something he needs to do.

Grogu doesn’t complain to much about being rugged back up. The wind had picked up while they sat, and the cloak offers an extra layer of protection from the icy blast.

They detour through the market on their way back to the ship so Din can pick up a few more things.

***

The light is fading by the time they return to the ship. It’s been refuelled so Din hands over the credits then takes the kid inside out of the cold. All of his earlier purchases have been delivered too, sitting just inside the hold.

Din’s anxious to get moving again, uncomfortable with spending so much time in one spot, but he needs to change Grogu into something clean and put everything away first.

He starts with the kid, unwrapping him from the sling and setting him down on the bed. He takes in the mess with a soft sigh beneath the helmet and collects a clean robe from their meagre box of possessions. Between the two of them they don’t own a lot of clothing. Still—the new outfit will be clean and keep the kid warm until Din can get the heating going again.

“Okay,” he says, holding up the robe. “I’ll make this quick.”

He manages to strip the kid one handed, keeping him still with the other, but the kid wriggles, making a game of the task.

“You’re going to get cold,” Din warns him, struggling to pull the new robe over the long green ears. “Just sit still.” He manages to pull the outfit over Grogu’s head and slip his arms through the sleeves. “I don’t know why you make that so hard every time,” he sighs, exasperated but fond. “I know you understand me.” He digs out one of the toys from their blankets and hands it over to keep Grogu entertained while he moves everything from the hold to the galley. It also gives him the opportunity to hide the gift he’d bought.

Once he’s done, he takes Grogu up to the cockpit—the sealed room will heat faster than the rest of the ship once the life support is engaged. He buckles in the kid and starts flicking the switches the power the engines.

Night has well and truly fallen across the snowy planet as the propulsion engines kick in. The ship rises steadily into the air and Din pilots them up out of the atmosphere. As soon as they’re clear of the planet, Din makes the jump to hyperspace hoping to put some distance between themselves and their last location, then sets the ship to autopilot.

***

Din wakes to the not unfamiliar sensation of something poking his face. It’s how he’s woken most mornings when he is not wearing his helmet—the kid was better than any alarm clock.

It comes again- the gentle pinching of his cheek- and he grabs the kid before the little womp rat can do it a third time. The kid giggles at the manhandling, wiggling against the hand holding him at bay. It’s a favoured game, but one that tends to be played too early. Din himself is an early riser, but somehow his kid just seems to have a knack for knowing when he’s in the deepest cycle of sleep and chooses that moment to wake him.

Today though, he doesn’t mind.

Rising from the bed, Din searches his hiding spot for the little cloth wrapped bundle.

“This is for you,” he says, returning to sit, legs crossed in front of the bed and setting down the gift. “Happy Life Day kid.”

It isn’t much— a couple of small toys so the kid will stop stealing ship parts and a new tunic. Grogu takes his time picking up each toy and holding them up to show Din, chattering away in excitement.

Din wonders if he understands the significance of this day, if anyone else has celebrated with him in the last fifty years or if, as far as Grogu’s concerned, today is just another day.

For Din, Life Day has always been day for family.

Is that what they are?

Family. A clan of two.

After everything they have gone through together, everything Din has done for the sake of the child. Everything he would do—are they not family?

Din’s entire worldview has shifted in the scant few months since he’d taken on a bounty and found a child. He’d removed his helmet—an act he swore he would never do in the presence of another living thing. He’d broken his creed for Grogu, yet somehow, he couldn’t bring himself to regret it. Everything he’d done in his desperation to rescue Grogu had been worth it.

Grogu needs the Jedi, he needs to be trained… but as a child surely he needs more than that? Din wants him to have more than that.

“Grogu, hey.” He pulls the kids attention away from the toys he’s gleefully smashing together. “I-” he licks his lips against the sudden dryness in his mouth. It shouldn’t be this hard. He is a Mandalorian, the beroya for the tribe, master of the darksabre, the weapon of the Mandalor.

As though he can sense Din’s internal struggle, Grogu stands, reaching up for Din.

Taking one little green hand in his, Din steady’s his thoughts with a breath, and speaks the words that will make them family.

“Ni kyr'tayl gai sa'ad.”

#the mandalorian #the mandalorian spoilers #the mandalorian season 2 #din djarin #grogu #baby yoda #fluff #fanfiction #tailswritesmando

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lordseochangbin · 4 years

Text

cats and cuddles- minho

a/n: so this was like one of the first fics ive ever written and i wrote it for a friend so hmm if it sucks im sorry LMFAO i thought it was cute so i wanted to share 🥺🥺

it was late at night when felt a quick snuggle on your chest. of course, the struggle of grabbing your glasses in the dark was real, your hands constantly patting your nightstand till you finally felt the plastic lens slowly putting them on before your cat could jump off your bed.

“fefe? where are you going?!” you watched as the red kitty ran out the door, following behind him as he rubbed his head against the window door.

“you wanna go outside? god this is why i told you go out earlier” you sighed before opening the door, “just goooo” and off fefe went, making an unexpected whimper that brought concern to your eyes.

you watched as the little feline jumped out the window, running through the hidden hole under the fence. you never noticed the cats secret dugout, and even at the middle of the night you wondered of the cats whereabouts.

this wasn’t the first night, you quickly realized, that the kitty had asked to leave so late. quickly grabbed a coat and throwing on some uggs, you ran out into the cold- a flashlight in your hand as you ran around the corner in search of the little guy.

“fefe...? where are you?” you called in a sing-song tone.

this call was only returned by the sounds of the night; quiet, mysterious, indulging. it made you wonder where the hell this little idiot could’ve gone.

almost on cue, you watched as fefe’s small steps ran down the neighborhood road in front of you. “fefe!” you called, running after him in the cold.

⊱ ──────ஓ๑♡๑ஓ ────── ⊰

he was having a bad night, i guess you could say. the day before he spent the night contemplating whether or not the girl he was with at the moment was actually the love of his life. the feeling of uncertainty was the worst, and when he called it off with his girlfriend he left the room knowing it was the right thing.

this didn’t settle with his ex however, the house left with shattered glass on the floor as she claimed, “minho! you can never live without me! no other girl would want you!”

the fear driven into his eyes only shuttered as he realized maybe she was right, but she was wrong.

chan reassured him of this later on in the day as he spilled out his worries, reminding him of a question that felix got him considering a few weeks ago. “hyung, do you really like noona?” it was a question that really got him thinking, did he really love her? was she the one for him?

she was allergic to cats, wasn’t a fan of ice cream, and hated books-- especially the harry potter ones. minho knew that 12 y/o minho would’ve threw his girlfriend into a bush when he realized she disliked j.k.rowling’s most amazing works.

this just didn’t settle with him, and the stress began to overwhelm him as he decided to open the door for fresh air. sitting near the window, minho ran his fingers through his hair as he listened to the cool breeze. humming in satisfaction, he let his eyes close shut before he could see the slightest of a figure passing the doorway.

“binnie!” he exclaimed, running out the door with two jackets instead of one in a sudden hurry.

there the two of you were, chasing after two kittens with no point of direction. simply following the steps of tiny paws as they ran through the dark night. little did you know that an glimpse of fate was behind this, not for you and the boy, but for the two kittens.

you watched as fefe turned a corner, stopping to take a breather before hearing someone yell “oh my god, its two kittens!” panic ran though you as you assumed it must’ve been a cat robber, and with quick instinct you ran the corner to see fefe’s little tail.

“fefe!!!” you ran with all your might, not noticing the male figure in front of you as you picked up the little kitten.

“ouch” the boy said, rubbing his forehead from the contact. you looked up at the boy, finding yourself in disbelief. how could such a handsome man be a cat robber?

“look.. p-please dont take my cat” you stuttered to speak, taking a few steps back.

“what..? oh my god look, this is my cat” you looked down to see another cat, another identical to fefe but jet black fur.

fefe jumped out of your arms, quick to cuddle with the strange yet attractive man’s cat. “they seem to be very close” you giggled

the boy smiled as he watched them brush their noses against each other, a scene that brought a little bit of warmth to your heart. he crouched down to rub the soft fur that filled fefe’s back before placing his index finger on a certain point that threw him off.

“is that your cat’s birthmark?” cats don’t have birthmarks but um yeah let’s pretend they do ah haha

“yeah!! apparently my kitten had a brother who was adopted and they placed these fake birthmarks in case they ever unite. it probably won’t happen though, i barely let fefe out. and even if it did, i wouldn’t believe it”

minho looked at his cat, and at yours, and back at you- biting his lip as he took a moment to process his thoughts.

“well start believing” minho said as he brought his kitten close to your side and revealed a similar birthmark on the same exact place. “are you kidding?!” you yelped in excitement, leaning down to carry the boy’s cat in your hands.

you shivered in the cold as another breeze flew past the two of you, catching the boys eye as he held his second jacket that he grabbed by accident in his hand.

“here” he stood up, slowly placing the jacket over your shoulders. in the process, you happened to look up at him. you noticed the way his deep brown eyes sparkled. the little birthmark on the top of his nose.

his pouted lips when he was simply thinking or doing something. his lips parted when he noticed you looking right back at him before he could step back and clear his throat. you found yourself snapping out of the moment as well, as the boy went back to pet fefe.

“what’s the name?” you asked.

“my names minho” the boy said, smiling at you as he expected a response

“... i meant the cat” you said, brushing the cats fur with your fingertips

“oh... it’s binnie”

“cute name. and in case you’re wondering im y/n, and this is fefe” you said, taking a second to wonder where the sudden confidence came from before the both of you could exchange kittens and most definitely exchange phone numbers.

⊱ ──────ஓ๑♡๑ஓ ────── ⊰

the next day, the two of you met at the place where you adopted the kittens.

“so.. theyre twins” you’d concluded after seeing the felines matching birthmarks and affection for each other.

“they’re like long lost brothers” minho said with a pout as he watched the two play with a piece of string

you looked up at him, only to catch him looking right at you “shouldn’t we keep them together?” minho suggested

you pouted your lips. after all this time you created a strong bond with fefe and never wanted to let him go. he was always the boy to cuddle with your feet as you did homework or sit on your lap as you watched tv. he was someone to talk to in the household and you couldn’t risk losing him.

minho felt the same way about binnie as well. he was a kpop idol in training, and when the stress had overcome him he always found relaxation in binnie’s comfort. he just didn’t want to let him go.

“to be honest, i know they’re long lost brothers or soulmates or whatever and i really want them to be together. but i just don’t wanna lose fefe” you picked up the red ball of fur, cuddling him into your chest as he licked the side of your cheek. minho picked up binnie as well before looking at you with a sort of agreement.

“how about we just meet up every now and then? for the cats” he suggested

“are you sure it’s just for the cats?” you laughed, giving minho a little shove on the shoulder before a dirty smirk could arise upon his lips, “who knows? maybe id like to see you as well” he winked before leaving the shelter.

“ill text you a date and address, you better be there y/n” he waved off before leaving you in utter shock.

did i just... flirt? and it worked?! you squeezed fefe in your hands, jumping up and down in place.

“fefe you just scored me a hot date!!”

all fefe could do was stare at you in absolute confusion, as the cat really didn’t understand a shit you were saying. but you knew what you just went down, minho definitely just asked you out.

⊱ ──────ஓ๑♡๑ஓ ────── ⊰

the second he got into the car, he called bang chan.

“oh chan chan chan hyunggg!!!”

“oh god, what happened now?” chan asked, a sense of drowsiness in his voice.

“i think i just scored a date!!”

“YOU SCORED A WHAT?!” jisung exclaimed onto the phone.

“stop being so loud you dumbass” minho responded. “long story short but her name is y/n and she’s seems really decent and pretty and she likes cats and i don’t know her smile is so pretty i just don’t even know what to say i..”

“that mans whipped. deadass” seungmin said, “did you ask her out?”

“i kinda did? im gonna ask her to come to my place”

“WOAHHH there pilot- to your place?! on a first date?!”

“ok ok no it’s a long story so our cats somehow found each other in the middle of the night”

“what?!”

“never mind.. anyways ima ask her to come tomorrow” minho smiled to himself before sending a quick text to you and patting binnie in the seat next to him.

⊱ ──────ஓ๑♡๑ஓ ────── ⊰

it was about 5 pm in the afternoon, the sun still hasn’t set but both your cats were eager to meet. it wasn’t just the cats however, you were just as excited to see minho as well and finally return his jacket.

without even noticing it, you kept it on. the warm material on the inside felt comfortable and you knew he must have had good taste in clothing.

grabbing your keys, you ran out the door with fefe on your hands and next thing you knew you were at the doorsteps of lee minhos home.

you took a few seconds to decide whether or not you should actually ring the doorbell before the door could open.

“hey! you can come in” minho laughed, noticing how nervous you seemed outside.

“thank you” you quickly nodded your head and walked inside before fefe could jump out your arms again and join binnie.

“woah..” you couldn’t help but to gasp and the looks of his apartment.

“is that a harry potter poster?!” you exclaimed, running over to what seemed like lee minhos hogwarts merch collection. he had the wand, the posters, and all the books lined up on a shelf.

“you’re a Harry Potter fan?!” minho exclaimed

“yess!!”

“ok count of three name your house” you took a deep breath as minho started the mini countdown.

“1...2..”

“slytherin!”

“gryffindor!!”

“oh fuck you minho, of course you’d be in slytherin” you said, making minho laugh

“hey what can i say? guess i just give off those vibes. now how about some coffee?”

from there the conversation was endless, you both realized you had a lot in common. although minho was more of a singer and you were more of an instrumental player you seemed to bond over music and books. this, minho realized, was something minho always wanted to see in a girl. something he wanted to have- a real conversation. one that he was actually interested in, and he loved getting to know every little detail about you and every small thing he said didn’t fail to make you laugh. you two seemed to be hitting it off and before you know it, the thunderstorm rolls in outside and you realize you didn’t bring minhos jacket.

“oh my god.. i forgot to bring your jacket! from the first day we met?”

“don’t worry about it”

“ahh im sorry, ill bring it next time i promise”

minho jumped in his seat, “wait no! don’t bring it. ever”

“why not?”

“it’ll give you a reason to keep coming back to me” he said, a smile forming on his lips. you couldn’t help but to laugh at how cheesy he was when he smiled, it was so perfect it almost seemed fake. but you knew everything he said and did was from somewhere deep in the heart.

“it’s raining a lot outside, do you just wanna wait until it gets a little better?” minho suggested

“i wouldn’t mind” you said, making yourself comfortable on the couch. minho got up to turn on the apt room heater, grabbing some hot cocoas and blankets for the both of you. the one thing that got you however, was how close he sat next to you when he came back. your shoulders brushed against each other as he threw the blanket on your lap, a light pink blush on your cheeks.

and in a few hours you found yourself resting your head on minho’s shoulder, both of your cats falling deep asleep on your lap as harry potter played on the tv.

“thank you ” minho suddenly spoke out of nowhere.

“for?”

“for... for entertaining me. i don’t know if you realized, but i really like you. i don’t know if the cats thing was something like fate but i really like you”

you looked up to minho as the fingers foudn thenselves intertwining under the heated blanket.

“i really like you too” you whispered before you could kiss the little birthmark on his nose, making minho smile as the movie played on.

⊱ ──────ஓ๑♡๑ஓ ────── ⊰

#ill add the little -continue reading- thing later because this b hella long 😭#lee minho #lee minho imagines #minho imagines #minho stray kids #lee minho stray kids #minho fluff #lee minho fluff #stray kids fluff #skz fluff #stray kids imagines #skz imagines

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sassenach72 · 4 years

Text

Private Jet

Fanfic

Pairing Sam Heughan Reader

Warnings Smut 🔞

✈️✈️✈️✈️✈️✈️✈️✈️✈️✈️

To work on a luxorious private jet could be different from day to day, you knew that all too well

When you got the list with the name on your flight you hardly looked at it you knew already

Usually it was drunk politicians or boring lawyers on their way to a meeting

A bachelor party clearly way out of hand with all drinking or something like that

You had been unfortunate to not been able to meet any celebrities on your flights, that only happened to your Co workers.

Until today

You have had a few days lay over in Glasgow, spending time with your friends, some shopping

You were a huge fan of Outlander and loved the surroundings of the city...and you couldn't lie.. You would not be sorry if you bumped into a certain red haired man

You looked out from the tiny window and saw the back of a blond woman and you also glimpsed an other person in the car, it looked like they were arguing

- Y/N is everything ready for our guests today?

It was the pilot who woke you up from your day dreaming

- Ohh yes Captain Lewis, everything is prepared

You checked yourself in the mirror once more, added a little more lipgloss and adjusted your blouse

Captain Lewis and yourself stood ready by the door to greet the guests and you saw a man started to walk up the stairs to the aircraft

My God, you had forgot to look at the name... But.. Was it really him?

You had to treat everyone ecually no matter who

- Welcome Sir

After greeting you both, you followed him to his seat

He sat down and leaned his head in his hand

- Do you want something to drink Sir?

At first he didn't answer he still sat and just stared blank in front of him, you didn't want to force an answer so you thought you would return to him shortly

- Sorry, Yes I would love a whiskey thank you... Make it a whole bottle love

Leaving him with a professional smile you headed back behind the curtains to collect the finest whiskey for him

Holy fucking shit

You knew this man.... All too well... Shit, it was really him..

- Take a glass for yourself to darling

At once it started to stir in your lower area, it happend that customers flirted with you but, could you really do this?

You took two glasses and went back to him, he had taken off his jacket and loosened his shirt a bit

He smiled up at you when you handed him one of them

- Ice Sir?

- No Thank you... And please.. Please don't call me Sir.. I'm Sam

- Hello Sam, you took his warm hand in yours

His fingers trailed a little extra on your hand

You filled his glass and sat down

- Thank you for keeping me company, it's very nice of you

- Oh, please Mr... Sam, it is no trouble at all, it's not that I am very busy here on this flight

He smiled gently and took off his sunglasses

This man really had the most beautiful blue eyes, you had always been amazed by them

But now when you were this close, you could see how they were framed by his long thick eyelashes and in the corner of his eyes there were attractive wrinkles

He sighed loud, gulped down his glass and shook his head

- Is something wrong?.. Can I..

- I feel like I start to loose it you know..

He twirled his sunglasses between his fingers

- I think my age is start to hit me.. All my friends has family.. I am all burried up in work over my head.. I need more to drink sorry..

You gaved him another and continued to listen to him

- ...when I was younger I used to be a little of a bad boy but now I thought I found the one..I really had

You filled yet another for both of you.. The alcohol was really filling up your system

- But I thought I saw your girlfriend on the airport

- Yes, she was supposed to join me here...She. She left me.. We have taken a break.. I.. Fuck..

- I am so terribly sorry Mr Heugan .. For everything..

The plane had a slight turbulence and he dropped his sunglasses on the floor between you.. for a brief second you exchanged looks like who it was that were going to pick them up

He unbuckled his seat belt and went down on his knees below your feet

He took his time while searching, you started to get frustrated and you felt it pooling between your thighs

Damn he was soo attractive, and see him like this, crawling underneath you on all four did something to you ..

- Sssorry love.. Can't seam to reach them.. They must have gotten under here

He grabbed your seat near your thigh and peeked under it again, he did it all on purpose you thought

His thumb rubbed your skin and you gasped for air, he glanced up on you and at once his eyes were dark of lust

He placed his strong palms on your knees and pushed them apart, your tight skirt strained on your thighs and the thin fabric almost broke, but he didn't seam to care, the skirt pushed higher and higher up, he placed your legs on each armwrest

You could feel his warm breath against the inside on your thighs

A moan slipped from your lips as his finger hooked the pantyhose just near your heat

He made a grounting sound when he ripped them apart with just his finger

He trailed in his finger in your underwear and with a loud *snap* they were off

With his strong hands he pulled you closer to the edge of the seat

- Shit you are so fuckin sexy, he growled against your wet core, I want you..

His beard brushed and tickeled your sensitive skin

- Ohhhh... Omg...

You bucked your hips against his face as he burried it deep between your trembling legs

His skilled tounge left a burning trail up and down along your folds

He closed his lips around your clit and sucked hard on it, you grabbed his hair and pushed him closer to your heat, you could feel that he was smirking

- Fuck.. Shit..

His lips let go of your clit with a soft pop and he replaced it with his tounge, which eagerly started started to circle fast around it

The moaning sound from him sended vibrations through your body and you could no longer hold back

You clenched your thighs around his head and screamed his name, feeling your walls started to get tighter

His tounge left your sensitive nub and plunged deep inside your slick core

With a loud scream you came and your juices ran over his tounge down his throat

He kissed your innerthigh and pushed himself up

You met him halfway and stood up on your shaky legs

His eyes were still dark, half open, his cheeks were little blushed

- Sit down Sir... It is my turn to make you feel good..

He kissed you softly on your cheek

- You already have... His kiss continued down your neck, besides, I am afraid I can't hold it back any longer

He unbuttoned his pants and sat down on the seat, you already had your clothing half ripped off so you placed your legs on either side of him

Looking down, you were not prepared that he would be that well equipped

You took it in a firm grip and pumped it a few times while looking him straight in his eyes, his head fell back with a loud moan when you placed the tip in your entrance

- Ohhh fucking Christ

At once you started to ride him, his hands held around your hips and pushed you up and down even more

- Ahhh.. Shit... Sam... Shit

He gritted his teths and clenched his jaw, thrusting his hips faster and faster

- Fuck I'm coming.. Fuck Ahhh

You felt yet again that you were close and you scratched his back like a cat

Under a long curse he held you tight and you felt his warm seed spurt inside your body

- Omg.. I... Shit.. God..

You collapsed on him and you breathed heavily together

His hand trailed on your back and you heard his heart beating

You wanted to kiss him so bad

As if he heard your thoughts he looked at you and placed his fingers under your chin

His lips were so so close

- This is Captain Lewis speaking

Due to changed plans, we are landing back in Glasgow again in 45 minutes

Mr Heugan , your girlfriend is waiting on the airport

#celebrities #sam heughan smut #sam heughan edits #Sam heughan #Smut #fanfic #outlander #outlanderedit #Outlander smut #Private jet #private jet #my edits

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is0gild · 4 years

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Ice Cream and Fire Oven Pizza - Chapter 13

Pairing: Elsa x Lea/Axel || Side Pairing: Riku x OC

Summary: Modern AU. She's an introvert ball of nerves who works at Ice Palace, a mall food court ice cream shop. He's the outgoing, sassy goofball who works at the Pizza Planet across the way. Hilarity, snark, and fluffy romcom hijinks ensue.

Word Count: 4,108

FIRST CHAPTER || PREVIOUS CHAPTER || NEXT CHAPTER

Credit for super friggin’ cute and super friggin’ amazing cover art goes to the super friggin’ talented ky-jane here on tumblr!

"Why are you stuffing the freezers full of Sven plushies?"

My arm stopped mid-motion and I blinked owlishly up at Frozone from where I was kneeled down on the Ice Palace floor in front of said freezers.

...I wasn't, was I?

Looking down at my hand and, more specifically, what was in it, I winced.

Yes. Yes, I was.

Fudge.

Hastily scooping them all off the stacks of ice cream bars and back out onto the tiled ground beneath me, I shot up to my feet, hiding one behind my back with a tiny, awkward laugh . "Oh! That! Yes, uh… I was just… trying to give them a… nice… frosty sheen! To, erm, make them more… authentic? Yeah, you know, since reindeer are from the frozen north, or, ah… somewhere… like that, heh!"

His eyelids drooped. "I… see."

"Oh yeah, chilled plushies are the new 'It' thing." Really? This was the hill I was choosing to die on? Apparently it was. I shoved the little caribou I was still holding into his face now, showing off the icy glaze to its fur coat as I pressed on, "They're all the rage in, er… Norway."

"Norway. Right," Frozone deadpanned as he gingerly took the proffered doll by one of its antlers. Don't think he was quite convinced. Just a wild guess here. "Call me old fashioned but for now, let's just keep all the plushes at room temperature, shall we? And please, run any other... innovations you might have by me first," he flashed me a thousand watt smile, "sound good?"

I returned it with a shaky one of my own, "A-absolutely!" He nodded and as soon as he turned his back on me, my grin faded into a grimace and I buried my face in my hands.

This hadn't been the first of my little "innovations" since starting my shift today.

Other winners included almost dumping used popsicle sticks instead of ice cream into the soft serve/milkshake machine, trying to pile scoops onto straws instead of cones, and giving taste spoons out as change for payment.

Yeah, that particular customer hadn't been exactly thrilled by the last one. Apparently the world just wasn't ready for my groundbreaking and avant-gard new form of currency.

But really, I just wasn't paying attention. I couldn't help it! I was too distracted and completely unable to focus. Hadn't been able to since the study session had ended yesterday. I'd hadn't even gotten a wink of sleep last night, merely tossed and turned while my thoughts had kept running round and round in endless circles.

I just… still couldn't get over it.

Me.

Having a crush.

My brain wouldn't wrap around it. I quite simply did not grok.

For starters, was I forgetting the six year relationship I had just been in? The fiancé I'd left at the altar a few short weeks ago? What was he, chopped liver? How could I just start having… feelings or whatever for someone else so quickly? I mean, okay sure, I hadn't been in love with the guy, but still… wasn't this breaking the rules or something? Committing some sort of romantic faux pas? Spurning basic etiquette in matters of the heart?

Perhaps I should take a step back and look at this all more objectively. Maybe I was just confused and didn't really know what it was I was actually feeling. Just what were these emotions exactly, anyway? I'd definitely never felt them before, and certainly not for my ex. But just because these sentiments were new and I was experiencing them only in the presence of a certain boy, didn't necessarily mean they were, um… affectionate in nature, right?

Yeah, this didn't have to be a crush. I was only jumping to conclusions! Lea was a great guy, absolutely, and I liked him, you know, as a person, but that didn't mean that I, like… like-liked him! I barely even knew him, for crying out loud! Granted, I did know he was kind, sweet, caring, funny, clever, made me feel comfortable around him (that in itself was kind of a miracle), and was a cutie-patootie to boot, but that didn't-

Wait.

Back up.

What was that word I'd just used?

...cutie...patootie?

Bleh, where had that even come from?

That's the thing about crushes, boo. You don't have to really know the person, just think they're a total cutie-patootie!

I shuddered as my roomie's earlier words came back to haunt me.

Thanks, Ghost of Rayne Past, this was exactly what I didn't need right now.

Okay, fine, so maybe it was a crush. I don't know! This was new territory for me! And even it was, so what? It's not like it mattered. Lea wasn't dating at the moment. Girls were a distraction, he was focusing on his school work, yada yada, that whole thing. And say, for the sake of argument, that weren't the case. It's not like I'd ever have the guts to…

...what?

Ask him out?

Pffft, me? Elsa, Queen of the Chickens?

Please!

And even if I went all the way to the magical land of Oz to ask the great wizard himself for some courage so I could so much as even begin to consider acting on these alleged feelings I may or may not have, Lea didn't see me like that. He'd made that abundantly clear. When he'd finally ended his self-imposed exile to the bathroom yesterday, the sheer amount of awkward that had filled the room after that had been enough to suffocate. And even when we did eventually manage to fall into a comfortable study rhythm once more, it didn't slip my notice that he'd always seemed to try and keep the table between the two of us for the rest of the evening.

So really, it was all moot. Lea wasn't interested. Which was okay, because I wasn't interested in him either! ...or maybe I was, but that was beside the point! The point was that this crush, if that's even really what it was, was a non-entity. Nothing that was ever going to be acted on. Nothing worth losing my head over like this, getting all-

"Elsa?" A throat cleared nearby and I glanced over my shoulder to see Frozone, back once more, now complete with a deadpan look. He held up a metal scoop. "...try this maybe?"

I stared blankly from it to him.

...crud, had I done it again?

I looked down at my hands and immediately got my answer.

Indeed I had. I'd zoned out for the umpteenth time and gone on auto-pilot. And my auto-pilot? Sucked. Big time.

Last I'd checked before I'd gone all space cadet, I'd been cleaning up the pile of Svens off the floor and hanging them back up on their hooks. Now that I was tuning back in, it seemed I'd wrapped up that task and had since moved on to assisting a customer. That customer had requested scooped ice cream on a cone - or so the hope would be, given I had a cone in hand (good start) and had opened the glass display to the refrigerated tubs. However, I'd apparently been about to start scooping… with nothing but my bare friggin' fingers.

I looked back at Frozone, plastering on a smile. "Oh, this? This is just, ah… well you know, studies have linked the use of traditional ice cream scoops back to, er… male… pattern baldness!" Ugh, just stop already, mouth, you're not helping! Do you not remember how bad at lying we are?! "Something about the way the, um, the metal... alloy interacts with the sugar is just… just yeah, bad juju or something." What I wouldn't give for a muzzle right now. What even were the words coming out of my mouth anymore? "Nine out of ten experts agree that, ah, scooping with just your hands is the safest, healthiest option, so… there you go! A great lil tip there for you, so yeah… you're welcome!"

"...I think I'll take my chances," he said, tone flat. Then he was pulling me to one side, out of earshot of the patron, "Okay, girl, you clearly got a lot going on up in there at the moment," he tapped me on the forehead a couple times, "so tell you what. I'll finish helping this customer while you gather the rest of the scoops, take them to the back for a rinse and use that minute to clear your head. Alright?"

Straightening up slightly, I gave a quick nod. "Yes sir."

"Atta girl." A quick pat on my shoulder from him, then he was moving off to greet the customer.

Giving myself a small shake, I then quickly set to work collecting the steel utensils. Focus. Focus! This wasn't the time to be twisting myself up in knots over something so inane. There'd be plenty of time for such self-indulgent stupidity once I got back home later tonight. For now, think ice cream. That's it, pure and simple. Ice cream. Live it, breathe it, bleed it. Ice cream. Nothing else existed. Nope, not a thing. Most definitely not-

My gaze chose that second to flick up, glancing towards the other side of the food court. Yup, you guessed it. A certain redhead was currently on shift at a certain pizzeria across the way. Lea was back at it with the pizza dough sorcery, spinning and tossing one on each hand. By chance, our eyes met and to my surprise, gone was any trace of lingering weirdness from yesterday. In fact, his face brightened as he flung one disc up into the air, freeing up that hand to give me an energetic wave.

There was a tiny spasm in my chest and I spun on my heel, turning my back to him.

We've been hit by friendly fire, captain! Status report.

Eyes? Wide and unblinking.

Hands? Strangling metal scoops while simultaneously pressing them against my hammering chest.

Face? Roasting like a honey-glazed ham on Christmas Eve.

...hold up… gah, what the heck was I doing?! Why was I freaking out? Weren't we past all this already, Elsa? Hadn't we left that awkward stage of your friendship with Lea in the dust behind us long ago? So what if you maybe, kind of, sort of had a teensy-weensy crush on him now? This wasn't grade school, you were a damn grown-up! So start acting like one, turn your butt around and wave back at him already!

So I did. I squared my shoulders, put on my best smile, did another about-face and waved back.

...and in my enthusiasm in said wave, I managed to smack myself in the face with the handful of metal scoops I was still holding.

Nailed it.

"I saw that," I heard Frozone's dry voice behind me and I whipped around to discover him all done with the customer and now standing there, arms crossed. "Don't tell me, let me guess. Whatever hang-up is going on with you has to do with that pizza boy." Pause to quirk an eyebrow. "Again."

I gulped, eyes darting to the left. "Heh… pizza what? Boy who?" Crickets. "I'm-going-to-go-wash-these-now-okay-bye!" I blurted out like it was all one word and bolted through the door to the back.

Whew! Dodged that bullet like Neo!

A few minutes later I was walking back out to the storefront, freshly cleaned utensils in hand and hoping Frozone wasn't going to feel like picking up exactly where we'd left off in that conversation. Seemed I was in luck, for all he said was, "I'm gonna go on my lunch break now. Should be slow since the rush just died down." He gave me a pointed look, "I trust you're all good now and can handle things on your own for a bit?"

Relieved, I gave a nod as I started putting the scoops back in their spots. "You can count on me."

"That's what I like to hear," he grinned, holding his fist out for a bump and I only hesitated for a second before lightly tapping my knuckles to his. "Alright, be back soon!"

I watched him go, then finished returning all the utensils before taking up position behind the cash register. Okay, you can do this. Don't let your mind wander. Stay in the here and now. Look around and pick something to concentrate on, keep you grounded. Like that plastic spork underneath that one table out there, dropped and forgotten, yet to be swept up by a roaming janitor. Or… that grey tabby at the Lucky Cat Café, what was his name again... Chirithy? Yeah, that sounded right. Or at Anna over there, bursting through the double doors, running straight for me as if her life depended on it and-

...wait, what?

Anna?

What was she doing here?

And why did she look so frantic and horrified?

When she got close enough, I began, "Anna, why are you-"

"Sis!" she shouted, stumbling to a stop in front of me and slamming both her hands down next to the register. "Shush! Listen!" She looked like she'd just ran a marathon and was out of breath, her every word punctuated with a pant or a wheeze. "Back… Back at- Overheard... Talking... Yelling… Mall ice cream! Mad, so… so friggin' mad! Drove… drove here! Quick as I- Right behind me! Just barely got here before… before-" She suddenly hissed in pain and pulled one knee up to her chest, grabbing her foot in both hands and bouncing up and down on the other. "Frick! Owie, charley horse! Charley horse!"

Figures her super human power to babble would fail her in the hour of her greatest need.

At a loss, I reached out across the counter to rest a hand on her arm, "Anna, slow down. Breathe. I can't understand you, you're missing some nouns there. What are you trying to tell me? Why-"

Using the countertop for support now, she grabbed me by the shirt and yanked me closer, bringing us nose to nose. "He's here! He knows!"

My blood ran cold.

I swallowed hard. "H-he? He w-who?"

Please, please, please don't say-

"The Duke!"

...oh.

Then it wasn't-

Well that's a relief!

Wait… Oh… Oh dear god, no… no, it most definitely was not!

Those food court's doors banged open a second time now and in he marched, proud and regal in all his big-nosed, bad combover, bushy mustachioed glory.

Weselton "The Duke" Fryse.

Aka my great uncle.

He and I weren't exactly on the best of terms, and that was even before I went all AWOL on my wedding day. Me being the eldest and heir to his nephew's fortune, he'd never quite forgiven me for not being born male. But I mean, come on pal, that was over twenty-two years ago - let it go already! The man was the very definition of dotty old coot and insufferable windbag. And for someone who talks so much, he surprisingly says very little. Mostly antiquated opinions and unsolicited advice, every last bit of it wrong and holier-than-thou. For all his ramblings over the decades, we had yet to even hear the story of where his nickname had even come from. Did it have to do with the esteemed university? Had the Queen of England herself actually honored him with the title? Did he have a reputation back in his day of settling matters by "duking" it out? Who knew? And honestly, who really cared?

But none of that mattered at the moment. What mattered was that he was here. That he knew. And if he knew, that meant mother and father knew. And if they knew… he probably knew as well. You know. Him. My ex.

It was official.

This was it.

The Worst Day Ever.

My chest seized. I couldn't breathe. Couldn't move. All I could do was watch in abject terror as the Duke drew ever nearer, head held high and stern, bespectacled glare burning holes into me. In fact, I think those glasses were even magnifying the sheer, seething rage contained within that scowl of his and turning it into a straight up death ray.

So this was how I was going to die, huh? Funny. I'd always thought clowns would be the ones to do me in. Well… this was the Duke after all, so… close enough.

How had he even found out? Anna never would have told him. How on earth…?

He at last came to a halt before me, hands folding behind his back. He spared a brief, unamused glance out of the corner of his eyes towards Anna, gracing her with a sniff of disdain. She merely glowered back at him. Then his full attention was on me. "Well, well, young lady," he intoned coldly, staring down his nose at me, "just what do you have to say for yourself?"

Okay, Elsa, easy there. You're going to get through this. Put away the shaky knees and sweaty palms. You're calm. You're collected. Just rationally and eloquently explain yourself to him so he sees your side of it and he'll understand and be on his way.

Clenching and unclenching my hands, took a deep breath and opened my mouth.

Calm. Rational. Eloquent.

Here we go.

"I, um… hm… guh… nhg?"

Well done.

"...quite." His mustache twitched dangerously from side to side. "Please then, allow me. You ran out on your wedding. Wasted your father's valuable time and munny. Broke your poor mother's heart. Embarrassed your whole family. Disrespected your betrothed's family. Disappeared with nary a trace, not so much as one word from you for a month, worrying us all sick... All for what? This?" His narrowed gaze gave the Ice Palace in its entirety a once over and, clearly, found it wanting. "...a ramshackle ice cream booth in a mall. A mall of all places!" he roared and I flinched, but said nothing.

I couldn't. Words had abandoned me. Panic had paralyzed me. All I could do was shrink more and more in on myself, wishing for the ground to swallow me up as his lecture turned into a full on tirade now.

"Working like some lowly, middle-class plebeian! Living heaven only knows where! Fraternizing with commoners! Have you no shame, child?! You little ingrate, you… you little monster! I always knew you'd be the downfall of this family! Of all the selfish, witless, deplorable, irresponsible, contemptible, impudent-"

"Cram it, Weaseltown!" Anna spat out, putting herself between me and him.

Oh great. Now here my baby sister came to fight my battles for me while I cowered behind her. My humiliation was complete.

He took a step back, nostrils flaring and mustache flapping violently as he huffed and puffed. "It's Weselton! The Duke to you, you spoiled brat! I always said your father should've used a firmer hand with you! You've grown wild! You're a disgrace! The both of you are! Why, if your father were here right this second, he'd-"

"Yeah, well he's not!" Anna got in his face now, staring him down as she stabbed a finger into his chest, "You are! Why is that, I wonder? Where is Daddy Dearest anyway?"

Talk! Say something, damn it! Please, just stop standing here doing nothing like a total idiot!

"Such impudence!" he slapped her hand away. "He's back at home, tending to your grief-stricken mother who is inconsolable, simply inconsolable upon learning the truth! Neither of them could bring themselves to come down here and bear the wretched sight of their eldest! So I took it upon myself after breaking the dreadful news to-"

She stamped her foot and snarled, "So it was you! Oh I bet you just couldn't wait to go and tattle to our parents as soon as you knew! Bet you were just positively giddy. How'd you do it? How'd you find out, you big weasel?!"

Their shouting match was causing a scene. People were beginning to stare. Including… I reluctantly dragged my gaze over towards the Pizza Planet… yup. There Lea was with a frown and one eyebrow cocked as he set the dough aside to watch this bit of drama unfold.

For the love of all that is good and mortifying, just end me. End me now. Please.

The Duke stiffened, face blotchy with barely restrained fury. "Hold your vile tongue, you snot-nosed whelp! I'll have you know the information was as good as mine the minute you told us she'd texted you. I knew if I hired a man to follow you, you'd lead us straight to her."

Anna gaped, "You had someone friggin' spying on me?!"

"And rightly so!" he harrumphed, puffing out his chest. "The scandals he reported back to me, why, I nearly died from disgrace! Carousing in a seedy, two-bit pub! Mingling with the filthy yokels! Prancing about on some stage, making an utter mockery out of yourself! Not to mention naught but days later, rendezvousing in secret at some mongrel's hovel and holing up in there with him for hours, you, you, you trollop!"

My stomach fell further and further, my face paler and paler with every word. Dear lord, he knew about all of that?! And what was he even talking about, holing up with- wait, was he talking when I'd helped Lea study? There'd been someone there, some sort of, what… private investigator or something, watching me the whole time? Might still be watching me, even now?

Oh crud, now Lea was over his counter and heading this way. Turn back, you kind, brave, naive fool! You know not the powers you seek to tangle with! Back! Back, I say! Back to the craft of pizza and outer space from whence thou came!

"So the frick what?!" my sister gave a scoff. "Elsa can do whatever with whoever she wants! As far as I'm concerned, what she does with her life is none of your business, you old fart!"

"I make it my business when her actions ruin this family's good name! Now enough of this charade, this, this absolute farce!" The Duke looked past Anna to point at me, "You have a duty to perform, young lady! A responsibility to uphold! You will come home this instant and marry-"

Shoving his arm away, Anna snapped, "She will not! Don't you understand? She doesn't love him, she wasn't happy!"

This was getting out of hand. Somehow, someway, whatever spell that kept me frozen abruptly broke. My feet were suddenly on the move and I was running out from behind the counter. I had to do something. Get between them, break this up, I don't know… just something.

The Duke sneered, "As if love and happiness matter in a marriage, bah!"

"They do when it's… it's…" she frowned in thought for a split second, then her face broke out into a triumphant grin. "When it's true love!"

A huff of a derisive laugh. "True love? Now you're just spouting off nonsense, pure hogwash!"

"Nu uh! In fact," there was now a sly gleam to her eye, "Elsa's already met her true love."

"She's what?!"

I've what?

At her words, I staggered and tripped, nearly colliding into my sister. Anna grabbed my shoulders, keeping me upright. Then she gave me a wink, grin twitching wider before looking back at our great uncle, "What'd you think? That that 'secret rendezvous' as you put it was... what? Just a fling? A one night stand? A booty call? Ha! Well jokes on you, Weaseltown, cuz that was her boyfriend!"

"Her what?!"

My what?

"That's right!" she cackled now as the Duke spluttered and wheeze, his hand going to his chest. "They're in love! Have been for a while now! She… oh! She ran away from her wedding to just be with him! Yeah!"

Anna, what are you doing? Anna, please stop!

"Hey, what seems to be the problem here?" Lea stepped up to join us just then.

Turn back! Back, I say!

"Well if it isn't the man of the hour!" Anna beamed at him, to which he just merely blinked and tipped his head to one side. "Weaseltown, allow me to introduce you to," she shoved me at Lea who caught me as I crashed into his chest, both eyebrows shooting up his forehead in confusion, "Elsa's one and only… her beau, her lover, her boyfriend and one true love! They make just the cutest couple, don'tcha think?"

"Wha- huh?!" Lea's grip on me tightened, his eyes widened and his face flushed bright red.

As for the Duke? Well, I suppose he handled it about as well as could be expected.

He fainted.

Author's Note: Anna, hon, no… Anna why? The way that girl's mind works sometimes, I swear… Lol! You might be able to guess where this is going, dear readers xD But if not, don't worry, it's gonna be spelled out for you reeeeeal soon xP Also, yay, a cameo from The Duke in all his huffy, stuffy, blustering glory! Just what we needed to mix things up, and boy, did things EVER get mixed up!

Next chapter, how will Elsa react to her sister's lil "announcement"? Not to mention, how will LEA react? Will Elsa ever be able to sort through her tangled feelings about this thing that may or may not be a crush? Is Elsa ACTUALLY onto something there with the frozen plushies idea? Is the Duke just straight up DEAD?! …probably not, but it was a fun question to ask xD Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading, I super duper appreciate it! And an extra BIG thank you to those of you who’ve liked, reblogged, and followed so far, seeing those lil notifications always brings the biggest, goofiest smile to my face!

FIRST CHAPTER || PREVIOUS CHAPTER || NEXT CHAPTER

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chrysalispen · 4 years

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xvii. calling from sad shires

OCCUPIED ALA MHIGO, 6AE 1564

The midday sun beat down upon weathered terracotta stones, the transparent shimmer of heat waves rising to the heavens from every street and every rooftop in sight.

It was another sweltering high noon in the throes of a Gyr Abanian summer, and even the water that splashed into the stone walkway fountains of the Administrative District would be as warm as a drawn bath, and Aurelia bas Laskaris paused at the wrought-iron gate with her silk parasol poised overhead in one gloved hand while fanning herself with the other and squinting against the daytime glare down the incline of the street towards the city centre. She was panting softly, both from the unaccustomed exertion and from the unrelenting heat. The paltry bit of air that stirred from the motion of her hand wasn't doing much to offset her discomfort, in part because it currently clutched a linen handkerchief she had drawn from one pocket.

The girl dabbed at her cheeks with the neatly monogrammed square of fabric before wrapping it about the handle of the iron gate, so as not to scald her fingers when she opened it- although in truth, her first course of action was to glance nervously towards the reflective bank of the street-facing parlor windows to make certain no one had marked her arrival. She knew perfectly well it wasn't proper for a girl of her station to be out and about without escort, but Sazha had been missing all morning and the jaunt to the delivery station was so close that in her opinion it hardly warranted a chaperone.

Still, she reasoned, mayhap a different approach would be a wiser choice. Just in case.

Aurelia let herself through the gate and braced it so that it would swing shut quietly. The metallic rattle and the creaking of the hinges were stifled at least somewhat, but she barely noticed that once she caught sight of her garden. She grimaced; even the hardy Althyk lavender blooms looked pitiful and half-wilted, the tiny purple petals drooping for want of relief.

Promising herself she'd water them once the sun was not so high, she hopped lightly in her kidskin shoes across the weathered garden stones in an idle and practiced manner that bespoke long habit. It was the cook's day off, meaning no one would be watching the kitchen entrance.

The door was unlocked. Cook insisted on leaving the door open in the afternoons to let out the heat when she was working, but for now the large room was dark and cool, and silent - there was not even the soft and insistent click of the ceruleum pilot lights from the stoves.

Aurelia gathered up her skirts and slipped through the space between the cold pantry and one of the cabinets until she reached the pass-through door to the dining room. From there she could enter the parlor, deposit the mail, and be back to her desk and its stack of texts before anyone was the wiser. That was the plan, anyroad.

She paused at the door and put her ear to one side, listening for a creak of the floorboards or aught else that might indicate someone on the other side before she judged it safe to continue.

Allowing herself a soft sigh of relief, Aurelia lowered her hand to the steel latch, slowly twisted the glass knob, and nudged the door open with the toe of one of her fine boots. It swung open on its hinges with only the smallest of creaks. She froze but no sounds arose in its awake, and with the same amount of care she let the door shut behind her, then slipped through the dark dining room and into-

"I should have figured as much."

Ah shite.

Her heart dropped into her stomach and she let her chin tilt upwards, towards the staircase. L'haiya dus Eyahri was leaning against the balustrade, hands neatly folded over each other as always, tail slapping with a measured rhythm against the spindly wooden shafts.

"Elle," the young mistress of the house managed. It came out as a very small and undignified squeak.

L'haiya released a most long-suffering sigh, though she didn't seem irate. "Honestly, Aurelia, I don't know why you must always insist on attempting to be underhanded. It doesn't suit you at all. You could have simply waited for me to return. I take it you've brought today's post?"

"I'm sorry, Elle, truly. I'd have sent Sazha, but he isn't here and you know how cross the postmaster gets when we leave missives overnight."

"What of it? The wheat-counters can take their dear sweet time snooping about your lord father's business before reporting it to the viceroy. You aren't to go out unattended; you know the rules."

"I wouldn't have been out alone at all if Sazha had shown his face." Aurelia released a long-suffering sigh and folded the parasol, placing it neatly in its spot in the brass stand by the bottom of the staircase. "Honestly, if he wanted the day to himself he could have just said so."

She could feel the woman's gaze on her back but barely paid attention as she flipped through the envelopes, barely scanning the names as she continued towards the parlor. All of the mail, as usual, involved official government business. Father had a specific place he wanted the post placed when it was brought home each day. He'd take his documents down the side hall to his study later tonight and flip through their contents when she sought her bed. She'd seen less and less of her father as she grew older, as she became engrossed in her studies and he with legate affairs, and the already quiet house felt lonelier and lonelier with each passing season.

As she crossed the threshold into the parlor, she came to an abrupt stop. The small blue card that had been lying on the side table the day before was gone.

"Elle," she called over her shoulder. She set the post down in its basket for her father on the mantelpiece. "Did Sazha pick up his card?"

Silence. She made her way back towards the threshold and peered out of the doorway at the stairwell, wondering if her question had simply gone unheard- but that didn't appear to be the case. The woman's odd eyes were fixed on her face, their sunset colors strangely muted.

"Elle?" she pressed.

For the first time since she could remember, L'haiya dus Eyahri could not immediately answer her question. Nonetheless, the Seeker stared at her charge, expression unchanging, and Aurelia... knew. She knew. A ball of ice settled in the pit of her stomach.

"L'haiya," she repeated, weakly. "Where is Sazha? Where did he-"

"Left at first light," L'haiya said. The words came slow, seeming to seep from her tongue like half-frozen molasses. "He reported to Porta Praetoria for processing. As he was bid."

Despite the heat of the day the parlor felt as though it had chilled to the dead of winter. She swallowed past the lump that seemed to have lodged itself in her throat.

"He... he can't have... he would have told me. He would have..."

"Would have what? What explanation do you believe you're owed?" L'haiya snapped. "That card amounts to a direct order from His Radiance. Sazha did no more than his duty. Should fate smile upon him he'll have his citizenship. You should be happy for him."

"But- but he can't just leave -"

"He can't leave without your permission. I see." Her eyes went flat. "And what do you think he should have done, then? Sat at your heels as your loyal hound forever? Ready to heel, or attack, or jump for you with a snap of your fingers? To go wherever you bid him? He knows the way of things here. 'Tis long past time you learned them yourself."

The girl paled, flinching from her governess' harsh words. L'haiya said nothing, remained still and stoic and silent, gaze flat and hostile. Aurelia was unsure if the Miqo'te's ire was meant for her or if Elle was upset about something else entirely, and at the moment she didn't care. She felt her own hurt and resentful fury welling up from a place deep within herself, where she kept it so carefully bound away.

On impulse she bolted for the front door and flung it open, sprinting for the gate.

"Aurelia! Where are you going?! Aurelia, come back this instant!"

Without even a brief glance backwards she ignored L'haiya's shout. She fled down the incline of the street towards the city, heedless of her path, nearly knocking aside a patrol on their rounds. Mostly conscripts, the cohort hastily deferred to her passage and all but leapt onto the promenade as one at their decurion's startled command.

L'haiya's voice, echoing against the stones: no longer angry, but frantic.

"Aurelia!!"

Her sides hurt. Her feet ached, bound as they were in walking shoes unsuited for the strain placed upon them. She kept running. Sprinting through the city center, through the marketplace, past the surprised and curious faces of onlookers.

At the southern wall she braced herself against terracotta stones and mortar, indigo eyes desperately scanning the high and wild loneliness of the salt flats. Wide and placid, Loch Seld shimmered like a queen's jewels against the sun and not a soul stirred beyond the city gates, even the water birds quiet and roosting to avoid the heat.

Across the bridge on the far side of the loch, she knew Porta Praetoria awaited. But she already knew it would do no good. It didn't matter how far she ran to catch him. Sazha wasn't coming back. They'd send him to the far edge of the Empire to make sure he wouldn't run.

Her best friend was gone. Just... gone. Not a word to mark his departure, not a word to her in warning.

She opened her mouth to take a breath, pain still stabbing at her sides from the run - and what came out instead was a sob.

~*~

"Aurelia! Aurelia, open your eyes-"

Her chest seized, sharp and painful, darning needles driven between her ribs.

She coughed violently. Heavy limbs convulsed against hard-packed dirt. Aurelia cringed away from the hand that roughly shook her shoulder, and tasted something like metal on her tongue. Tasted like... crimson. Blood. She'd bitten it. Couldn't remember when.

A pair of arms snatched her from the ground. Her cheek pressed against something damp and cold and-

Yellow.

"Miss Laskaris. Are you all right?" the yellow asked. He spoke Common, in an accent foreign to her ears. The words were rapid-fire and loud, laced with an urgency she didn't understand. "Can you talk?"

It didn't make sense. The Garlean turned the question over and over in her head, still bemused by the sudden change in sensory impressions. Another city lingered within the annals of her mind and in the blazing heat of her skin: bright and punishing light, smell of salt and cardamom, translucent waves upon sunkissed terracotta.

This place... was cold. Wet. Cold and wet. Petrichor smell and slick earth and the flickering impressions of leaves.

She was shivering in earnest. Cold. She was cold.

"Sazha," she croaked, the only word she could manage.

Her tongue ached, swollen and sore. The word dropped graceless and half-growled from her lips.

Yes, that was right. She’d been looking for him. He had left and she’d gone looking for him. But she couldn't find him because he

(couldn't come back. not now. not ever.)

wasn't here either, surely not. This place wasn't Ala Mhigo, it was-

She couldn't remember. But Yellow Arms looked familiar.

It didn't make sense.

He stared at her flushed face, at the eyes black-blown and unblinking, and shouted at someone outside her range of vision. "Run for the Fane and get the Guildmaster on linkpearl! Tell him there's an emergency!"

"But-"

"Now!"

Retreating footsteps. Something lukewarm on her skin, pressed against her burning brow.

Water from the fountains? But there's water in the house-

"I've got you," Yellow Arms said. His voice was rough, anxious, his words tripping over themselves. He was casting some kind of spell, one she ought to remember, one that had been used on her before. Recently. "You're going to be fine, do you hear me? You're going to be fine."

Cold. She was cold.

(where are you where is this why am i so c)

Aether weighted her frame into the ground like the base of a standing stone. Her brain kept moving in fits and starts, her words wouldn't come. She lay in a stranger's arms in a land that wasn't hers: silent and heavy and crumbling, like the ancient altars of desecrated mountain temples. Half-forgotten. Grasping for meaning and finding nothing.

The pall of memory dragged her back down into its sunless sea, and she drifted once again.

Time fractured, for a while.

She fell through starfalls and floods and the drop of a great red moon, punctuated with fitful moments of disjointed and tenebrous wakefulness in the bowels of a windowless room.

Sometimes she was alone; other times there were figures that bent over her bed. The faces sometimes frightened her. She had no way of knowing who she would see when she opened her eyes. Most often they were strange to her, or vaguely familiar at best. An Elezen woman, peering into her face with worried eyes. A Miqo’te frowning closely at her, rounded pupils even larger for the lack of light. A boy with a calm countenance and rain-gray eyes as gentle as the hand on her brow, horns peeking through his sandy hair.

Sometimes it was faces she knew all too well: Sazha, L’haiya, her father. A parade of classmates and relatives and superiors, berating her and listing her myriad failures in disappointed whispers.

Once she jolted out of sleep with a name she didn’t know on the tip of her tongue, but the syllables receded into oblivion before she could speak them aloud. She tasted wet and salt: tears leaking into one corner of her mouth-

-but she was already sinking under again, consciousness subsumed like shifting sands beneath waves. The last lucid memories she had were sensory: the chill of a damp cloth run over her limbs and a woman’s voice speaking in soft and solemn tones.

She slept on.

She awakened to the sound of birds and the sight of wooden rafters.

Aurelia’s eyes felt as though someone had replaced them with open sandbags; they were sore and raw and the act of shutting and opening was sluggish and painful, but she forced herself to do it anyway.

She lay in something soft and warm and pliant. Sunlight streamed into the room through a double-paned window, spilling over a small vase of tea roses. The sound of soft and regular breathing caught her ear at about the same time as the sensation of something tapping against the mattress. A glance down showed her it was a tail. A Miqo’te tail.

She turned her head to follow the twitching tip to its source, driven by a small spark of hope that perhaps, just maybe, everything had been a dream. Maybe she was home, and Sazha was-

A deeply tanned man - who was not her childhood friend - dozed in the chair a few fulms away, wearing a familiar yellow overcoat. One of his fawn-colored ears flickered every now and again with his quiet snores.

The sight dispelled the last remaining vestiges of her confusion. This was Eorzea, not the Empire. Sazha was gone, she was a prisoner, and the man dozing at her bedside was there to ensure she wouldn’t attempt to escape her sentence.

Aurelia allowed herself a quiet and regretful sigh… and was promptly seized with a coughing fit, one that startled Keveh’to awake.

“Miss Laskaris! Are you-”

“Water,” she coughed. He scrambled for the decanter on the side table and poured water into an earthen mug, all but thrusting it in her face before flinging himself to his feet.

“Hold that thought! I’ll be right back. Mother Miounne said to let her know when you awakened.”

“Wait, how long have-”

Keveh’to was out the door before she could finish her question.

She took a long sip of the water between small coughs and took in her surroundings. The room was recognizably hers - her black bag sat in the corner next to the mostly empty armoire alongside her mud-stained pattens - and at some point someone had disrobed her. She wore only a hempen shift over her smalls, the garment that passed for her bedclothes. It was one of the secondhand items she’d been given upon her arrival in Gridania with naught save the clothes on her back.

Once she’d worn fine silk gowns and carbonweave-lined corsetry and furs; now she wore simple slops most like those donned by the Empire’s provincial smallfolk. There was a certain irony in it that might have made her laugh under other circumstances, but sitting alone with a mug of water trying to get her bearings was not really a laughing matter. She remembered heat on her skin, the scent of cardamom and her governess’ sachet, and felt suddenly and achingly homesick.

There was a soft rap on the door.

“Miss Laskaris?” a woman’s voice called. “Are you awake? May we come in?”

“Yes, by all means.”

Three figures came single-file into the room. Keveh’to had returned, and with him he had brought Miounne and the youthful-looking master of the Conjurers’ Guild. E-Sumi-Yan’s features were grim, his mouth set in a flat and worried line.

“Ah, Aurelia,” Miounne said, startling the Garlean with the use of her name, and her voice held a note of warmth that hadn’t been there before. Her hands held a tray with a teapot, a cup, and a bowl of lentils and wheaten bread. “ ‘Tis good to see you awake. I thought you might like to break your fast.”

She hadn’t realized she was hungry until the smell hit her nose and her stomach let out a loud and very unladylike growl.

“I take it that’s a yes. Well, then.” She set the tray on Aurelia’s lap. “I believe the Guildmaster wished a word with you in private, so I shall take my leave. Sergeant Epocan, come with me, please.”

“But I’m supposed to-”

Miounne cast him a sharp and meaningful glare. “Sergeant. Now.”

Grumbling, Keveh’to let her shove him out the door with an irritated flick of his tail, leaving her alone with the master of Stillglade Fane.

He didn’t speak for long moments, and Aurelia felt absurdly small, as though she were being called on the carpet - although E-Sumi-Yan’s body language and expression did not speak of anger or even disappointment, merely deep concern. Unable to sit still beneath his scrutiny, she picked up her spoon in one hand and the bowl in the other. Her companion seemed content to wait until she had emptied the bowl; he did not speak until she had picked up her cup of tea and taken a tentative sip.

“As Mother Miounne says, Aurelia, ‘tis good to see you awake. You had everyone quite concerned.”

“How long was I asleep?”

“You awakened on several occasions, but you were rarely lucid. You have lain in a fever for nigh on a sennight.” The Padjal sat down on the stool Keveh’to had occupied, folding his hands in his lap. His gaze was very, very direct, and Aurelia had to stare down into the contents of her cup to escape it. “Do you recall aught of what happened before your collapse?”

“There was a boy,” she murmured, feeling more than a little foolish to recall it. “He was very sick, and I… I don’t know what I did. It was a feeling like… water? I suppose? My apologies, but I’m not entirely sure what transpired. There was a pain in my chest and then everything went black.”

His gaze fell to his hands for a few tense moments before it fell upon her again, but his eyes had softened a touch.

“I must needs offer mine apologies,” E-Sumi-Yan said simply.

“What? Why?”

“What ailed you was depletion shock. You used your own aether to power a healing spell and did not have enough remaining to fuel your own body’s functions.”

Aurelia swallowed. “I… I felt my chest…”

“Total depletion of one’s own aether is very rare in controlled environments, but when it occurs it is life-threatening - and often fatal, if not treated immediately.” E-Sumi-Yan appeared as though he meant to add something else, but thought better of it, clearing his throat instead. “I shan’t go into the details, but suffice to say, you were extremely fortunate.”

She poured herself another cup of tea with shaking hands.

“In truth, I had a mind to lecture you most sternly upon the consequences of your actions before I realized that the fault could not be laid at your feet.” He shook his head. “Garleans, it is widely held, cannot channel aether.”

“Are… you saying that I-”

“You made a very common beginner's mistake. A dangerous one,” he said, the flat, grave expression returning for a brief moment. “But I cannot take you to task for it as I would one of our novices. The possibility you might harbor this particular talent did not cross my mind and that lapse in judgment very nearly cost you your life. For that I am truly sorry.”

“What- no, you don’t have to do that,” she protested as he bowed to her from his seat, nearly folding himself in twain. “Please, Guildmaster. Really, it’s quite all right. Naught but my own recklessness, for which I have paid well. I’m sure it shan’t happen again.”

“Once you have regained your strength I will personally see to the matter of your training.”

“But-”

“This is not a request, Aurelia. Our city has its rules for a very good reason, and I cannot allow you to roam about the Twelveswood with your magicks unchecked,” E-Sumi-Yan said firmly. “I shall have Mother Miounne send word to the Fane when you are ready to return to your duties, and we will speak of this matter anon.”

Long after the door had closed behind him, Aurelia sat in stunned silence.

After a few moments she set her teacup down upon the worn and stained surface of the tray in her lap and tilted her wrists upward. Her fingers unfolded to reveal her palms like day lilies at morning, and she stared at her opened hands.

Hands that had channeled aether in order to heal.

Hands that had channeled aether.

She’d never touched so much as a mote of aether in her life so how could she do it now?

“Seven hells,” she growled aloud, passing a hand across her eyes.

She set the tray aside at the edge of the bed, and on legs that felt decidedly unsteady, she stood and made her way to the armoire for something to wear. She could take the tray back to Miounne and stretch her legs, use the chamberpot, and hope she wouldn’t be sent back to her room with a lecture for being up and around so soon.

But she needed to talk to someone about this, and that someone was probably and very realistically going to be Keveh’to, and she was going to need something much stronger than tea.

#chrysalispen writes #reborn by fire #chapter 17

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mythicalsecretsanta · 4 years

Text

Christmas In Paris (T)

This gift is for: Wren (AKA @cerealbath) Wishing you a very festive holiday season and good vibes for the coming year. Hope you enjoy your gift! From your Secret Santa, Ellie (AKA @elliefcutie)

Link to AO3, or read below:

“Link, hello earth to Link,” someone shouted. “S-s-sorry,” he stuttered in reply. They’d been waiting so long at the check in counter he’d slipped into a daydream. One where he was at home watching his favourite paint drying show instead of here in a crowded airport. “Man what are we gonna do, they’re saying my bag weighs too much?” “Why don’t you just take some stuff out? I’m pretty sure you packed your entire bedroom. Do you really need all of it?” Link asked. “Yes I need all of it,” Rhett said placing extra emphasis on the word need. “I’m used to a certain level of comfort, you know that.” Listen, all I’m saying is do you really need silk bed sheets, a fur coat and the entire contents of your bathroom for a one week vacation in Paris?“ “ You’re totally missing the point Link those aren’t just any old things those sheets are made of rare golden orb spider silk that were painstakingly pulled out individually by blind monks from Madagascar and the-” “Ok,” Link interrupted him. “I get it. I have some extra room in my bags you can use that but anything that doesn’t fit you leave behind alright? “Really?” Rhett said “You’re a lifesaver buddyroll.” So half an hour later they boarded their flight with Rhett who was now wearing his fur coat and Link’s nearly empty carry on was now stuffed full of silk bed linens, various lotions creams serums and hair styling products. Being on the plane brought Link’s anxiety up to near panic attack levels. “Why’s it gotta be so gosh dang small in here?” He’d begun sweating profusely the moisture accumulating uncomfortably in all his crevices. “You think this is small be glad you’re not me brother I got legs for days and nowhere to put em,” Link just gave a weak smile in response his arms moving to wrap around his midsection. A pathetic attempt at self comforting. Why had he agreed to come on this stupid trip in the first place? Neither of them had anything great to go home to for the holidays. Rhett’s mom had re married and now had a replacement family as Rhett called it. Link’s mom had died when he was in college. His parents had divorced when he was two and Link had never really been close with his dad. So it made sense that they’d spend the holidays together right? Better than being alone. Not that Link really minded being alone. Last year they’d stayed home and just ordered in watching Christmas movies on Netflix. For whatever reason Rhett had gotten the idea that they should go somewhere this year. Link had flat out refused at first but Rhett was very insistent. Also he was very good at getting Link to try new things. So eventually he had caved. And here they were. Link remained quiet all throughout the safety talk which increased his anxiety level even more, and takeoff. “Link you ok?” Rhett asked once they were safely in the air. “Your being awfully quiet.” “Yeah I’m fine a little tired.” Which wasn’t a total lie he was tired. Stress had a strange way of making him sleepy. “Why don’t you try to sleep we got a long flight ahead of us anyway. You can use my coat as a pillow if you want. I’m sweating to death in it anyway.” Before Link could even answer Rhett was twisting himself around to get the cumbersome thing off. It was a struggle that lasted several minutes and by the time Rhett handed him the coat he was smiling. He couldn’t really refuse it after that could he? “Thanks” he said. Propping himself up against the window he fell asleep almost immediately.

“Link, hey Link,” Rhett half whispered while nudging his shoulder. Link just groaned and pushed him away. “Lemme sleep Rhett .” “You gotta wake up buddy we’re about to land.” Link sat up his hands moving automatically to try and rub the sleep out of his eyes. “I slept through the whole flight?” he said in disbelief. “You sure did sleepyhead,” Rhett replied laughing one of his grumbling laughs. Just then the pilot came on over the intercom. “Hello this is your captain speaking we’re just beginning our descent into Paris and we should be landing in approximately twenty minutes. The weather is a chilly 50 degrees Fahrenheit with clear skies. The local time is 5:05pm. Please put you seat belts on and thanks for a great flight.” Then she said the same thing in french. At least that’s what Link assumed because he understood nothing beyond bonjour despite having taken three years of french in high school. Link immediately fastened his seat belt and looked out the window. The sun was setting and it cast a beautiful rose gold glow over the city that Link had to admit looked stunning. Link started when he felt Rhett’s beard tickling his neck. “Looks pretty great right? Don’t be shy you can say that I made a good choice. That this is gonna be a million time better than just being at home.” Link rolled his eyes. “Maybe just maybe this won’t be a total disaster.” “It’s gonna be awesome just wait until you see what I got planned,” Rhett said. His eyes and smile wide with excitement more than Link had ever seen them before. Rhett had insisted on being the sole planner of their trip. Link hadn’t protested since he didn’t really care. He fully expected to have a terrible time but his first look at the city had him feeling unexpectedly optimistic about it. He smiled back at Rhett. “So what are we doing tonight?” “There’s this really old cinema that shows old Christmas movies during December. Tonight there playing It’s a Wonderful Life. But we could do something else if you want. If you’re too tired we can just stay at the hotel.” Rhett said rather rapidly. His cheeks turning red. Link squirmed in his seat suddenly feeling very antsy. It was probably the cramped seating he just needed to stretch his legs. “That sounds really good actually.” Rhett grinned and was it Link’s imagination or did his the redness of his face deepen even more? He turned to look out the window again at the city growing ever closer.

Link swallowed the last bite of the cracker sandwich he’d been working on for the past hour and a half. He chased it with a big gulp of sparkling water. Rhett had chosen an upscale restaurant for dinner where nothing sounded familiar (mostly because of the french) or appetizing. The waiter had given him the stink eye when he’d asked for plain bread and cracker sandwich like the ones he always had at home. Rhett however had ordered a plethora of items and in french too. Link’s sandwich had come rather quickly a whole loaf of french bread and some sort of multigrain crackers that was something of a disappointment to Link. So he’d been taking halfhearted bites of it every so often while Rhett inhaled dish after dish of rich looking foods covered in cream sauces. “You sure you don’t wanna try any of my food?” Rhett asked. “No I’m good” “Come on at least have a bite of the escargot. The butter herb caviar sauce on top is absolutely divine.” “Isn’t that snails? No thanks.” Link said in disgust. “How about dessert I ordered the wildflower honey lavender gelato. That’s sorta like ice cream. You like ice cream right?” Link did in fact like ice cream one of the few things that had stuck from his brief foray into the world of tasting. The way Rhett was acting was making Link nervous. He seemed so eager for Link to be pleased that Link felt obliged to be pleased. “Sure buddy that sounds good” Rhett smiled brightly and there was that blush again. They’re dessert soon arrived in a single dish with two spoons. Link frowned his personal ice cream sharing rule was don’t unless you’re willing to make out with said person. “Sorry Link I’ll ask them for a separate bowl,” Rhett said. Link glanced around the crowded restaurant in search of wait staff to flag down and found no one. What the hell he thought. He’d flown halfway across the world today surely he could share ice cream. They had separate spoons after all. “Don’t bother,” Link took the tiny spoon on his side of the bowl and brought it up to his mouth. The gelato was amazing it had an icy smooth consistency less creamy than ice cream but sweetened perfectly with honey and just a touch of lavender to brighten it up. Link went in for a second bite and realized Rhett was just staring at him mouth agape. Which Link found odd because Rhett was never one to hesitate while eating. “Is that not ok with you? It’s because of my herpes isn’t it? I’m sorry we can order you a separate one.” “No just a little surprised it’s like your a whole different Link in Paris.” “Is that a bad thing?” “It’s interesting that’s for sure,” Rhett replied picking up his spoon.

The cool night air nipped at Link’s arms making giving him goosebumps. He was beginning to regret their decision to walk back to the hotel after the movie. Which despite Rhett’s disbelief he had never seen before. “You cold Link?” Rhett asked. “Yeah a little figures when we could actually use that ridiculous fur coat of yours we don’t have it.” “I’ll have you know that coat is made of very rare Siberian Brown Lemming fur. Which is said to be so soft it’s like wearing a cloud.” Link just rolled his eyes. “So you wanna know what on the itinerary for tomorrow?” Rhett asked. “Nah I’m sorta enjoying this whole going with the flow thing. It feels very freeing not worrying about every little thing for once.” “I get that. Let’s pick up the pace so we don’t freeze our balls off shall we.” Link let loose a high pitched giggle and began to run down the street.

Link stifled a yawn as he watched people go by on the quiet Parisian street. Rhett had dragged him outta bed at an ungodly hour and to this quaint little cafe nearby. He was currently sipping his second cup of espresso in hopes it would chase away the jet lag. “Did you not sleep well Link” Rhett asked seemingly unaffected by jet lag and entirely to chipper. “I slept fine it must be jet lag. I’ve never felt so tired in my life. You seriously don’t feel it?” “I slowly adjusted myself to Paris time over the last two weeks, remember? I asked if you wanted to join me and you declined. I’d bet you’re regretting that now.” Yes Link did seem to recall Rhett going on about that how it would eliminate jet lag and help optimize their enjoyment of the trip. But he’d said it right before bed and staying up later had seemed too difficult to an already sleepy Link. “I have just the thing to cheer you up,” Rhett said. “You wanna know what we’re doing today?” Leaving absolutely no time for Link to reply he answered his own question. “There’s this really cool winery called Le Clos Montmatre right here in the city and they give tours. Guess who’s gonna be on one of those tours?” “Us?” Link said flatly. “Bingo” “I can’t wait.”

“I think we’re lost,” Link said “We are not lost,” Rhett insisted. “Really so we were supposed to get on several different trains and then get off to stare at this map in the station? Then I guess we’re not lost after all.” “Ok, so we may be a little turned around,” Rhett said. “But we are definitely not lost. We just need to get on this train… or maybe this one.” He trailed off. “Alright we may be lost,” He finally admitted. “So why don’t we just go above ground and catch a cab or we’ll miss our tour. Besides it creeps me out down here. It’s like being buried alive.” “Because that would be admitting defeat. This is how people get around here. If we take a cab we’re missing out on the authentic Paris experience. “I don’t think part of the authentic experience is aimlessly getting on and off trains with no idea where you’re going. I’m getting a cab you can stay down here and keep having the authentic experience if you like.” Link took off toward the exit and Rhett followed.

Due to the narrow climbing roads the cab dropped them off a quarter mile from the actual winery itself. They walked in silence for a few minutes until Rhett broke it abruptly. “Sorry about this Link. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.” Rhett said eyes on the ground as they walked along.” “What do you mean?” Link asked. He felt somewhat confused everything seemed fine to him. “It’s just I have this picture in my head of how I want things to go, you know. Reality never seems to live up to that picture. This is only the first day and already I screwed things up.” “Wait…what? You think you screwed things up?” “Well yeah you’re all jet lagged, we got lost and now we might miss our tour.” He finally looked up at Link. His amber eyes pitiful. “Rhett, you did not screw things up I will get over the jet lag, everybody gets lost in strange cities and I’m pretty sure we found the vineyard.” He pointed up to the vine covered mansion before them. It was beautiful Link was beginning to think everything in Paris was. “You really don’t think I’m screwing things up?” Rhett asked breaking eye contact with Link and looking straight ahead. “Not at all.”

“Mercie,” Rhett thanked the man who had poured their wine. The tour had been interesting. Emile,their tour guide’s enthusiasm had been contagious. They were now sitting in the cellar sampling some wine. “ “A votre sante,” Rhett said “Huh?” Link said. “Since when do you speak french?” “I learned online. I figured one of us should.” He shrugged nonchalant. “A votre sante means cheers.” They clinked glasses. Link swallowed his all in one gulp, hissing at the unpleasant burning sensation in his throat. It did taste vaguely fruity which was ok but he really couldn’t see what all the hype was about. He would choose grape juice over this any day. He glanced up at Rhett to find him staring wide eyed at him. “What? Did I spill some on my shirt or something?” he looked in panic at his white and blue striped polo. It looked alright to him. Rhett just laughed that big loud rumbling one he did when something caught him by surprise. When he caught his breath he said. “No it’s just that not how you’re supposed to do that man. It’s not like taking jello shots at a frat party.” Link blushed. “Give me a break Rhett I’ve never done this before.” “How have you never done this before?” “I just haven’t. You don’t need to laugh at me.” “Sorry Link. I guess I’ll just have to show you how it’s done. Here I’ll share mine with you.” He reached over and poured half of his glass into Link’s. “You gotta take your time with it really get to know it. Swish it around in the glass, like this.” Rhett slowly moved the stem of his glass in a circle. Link copied. “Excellent. Now go ahead and take a whiff of it. Really take in that aroma with your nose hole.” “Is this really necessary seems a little over the top to me.” “Yes it’s necessary drinking wine is all about the experience Link. It’s the only way to really detect all the nuances of flavor.” “Fine I’ll sniff the damn wine just let it be known that I think it’s ridiculous.” “I’m ok with that,” Rhett said. So Link smelled the wine. It smelled fruity and maybe a little acidic. “Mmm,” Rhett said “ A very nice smelling wine it smells full bodied with a hint of lemon verbena.” “Can we actually drink it now?” Link asked. He was beginning to lose patience with Rhett’s process. “Sure buddy but you should take small sips and aerate it by running it through your teeth.” He kindly demonstrated this and it make the most horrendous noise. “There’s no way I’m doing that. You’ll have to settle for me taking small sips.” “Your loss. I’ll be over here experiencing the full flavor of wine as intended.” Link rolled his eyey as he brought the glass to his lips. He did keep it in his mouth a little and to his surprise he noticed the hint of citrus Rhett had mentioned. Also the burning sensation was much milder and pleasant this time around. “This is pretty good actually,” “See I told you,” Rhett said practically beaming. “You have to do it the right way for optimal enjoyment.” Link smiled with a shake of his head. They continued their tasting mostly in silence with only an occasional interjection from Rhett about the flavours of the different wines. Once the wine had all been tasted Emile cleared her throat to get their attention. “So that concludes the wine tasting portion of the tour. We’re going to finish off the tour by going to see our fields. They have a very unique graded set up that offers up some wonderful views of the city. So feel free to stick around afterwards to take some pictures. Link pushed his seat back as he got up he felt dizzy and had to brace himself on the table. “Whoa, you alright there Link? The wine gettin’ to ya?” “I’m alright,” Link replied. “Just felt a little unsteady there.” Truthfully Link felt very strange maybe he shouldn’t have had so much wine. He figured he would be fine the tour was almost over anyway. It was a struggle to keep himself steady as the walked but he managed it. They emerged into the sunshine at the bottom of a steep incline. Now he knew what Emile had meant by graded set up. It looked like they had carved the vineyard right out of the hillside. It was possibly one of the most unique things Link had ever seen. Unfortunately he wasn’t really in a state to enjoy it. The feeling of unease that he’d felt in the cellar seemed to be growing by the minute. Everything after that was pretty fuzzy until Rhett elbowed him in the ribs. Hey Link mind if we go to the top I really wanna get some pictures.” “Yeah sure sounds great,” Link said. He did not in fact think it was great. He had no idea how he was going to make it up there. Rhett chattered away at him as they climbed. “That was pretty awesome right Link? Wait till you see what I have planned for tomorrow. It’s even better I think gotta make Christmas Eve special right? Link just nodded. As they neared the top Link’s head was spinning so bad he had to sit down. “Hey Rhett,” he said his words coming out slurred. “I’m not feeling so well.” He then proceeded to vomit in the bushes beside him. Rhett rushed to his side putting his hand softly in the small of Link’s back as he wretched the meager contents of his stomach onto the foliage. “Oh Link I’m so sorry. You’re kind of a lightweight hey? Don’t worry we’ll get you back to the hotel and you’ll be better in no time.” Link finished vomiting and sat back up wiping the mix of throw up and spit on his jacket sleeve. “You get it all out?” “I think so.” “Good, good you just stay right there I’m gonna order us an Uber ok?” He pulled out his phone typing away at it furiously. A few minutes later he pocketed it. “It’ll be here in 20 but we’re gonna have to walk a little to get there. Think you can do that?” Link nodded. “Alright let me help you there.” Rhett said. He crouched down slinging Link’s arm over his shoulder. “We’re gonna try standing on three. One..two…three.” They struggled up together Rhett doing most of the heavy lifting Link only managing to fall into Rhett’s arms. Link’s only thought was that he smelled good some sort of deep musky scent. “Ok we made it up good job. Now let’s get you straightened out.” Link reached out weakly trying to pull him back in but Rhett didn’t even seem to notice. “You think you’re ok to walk?” “Yeah I think so.” Slowly they made their way back down where a concerned looking Emile met them. “Mon dieu. Is your husband okay Rhett?” “He’s not really much of a drinker. I shouldn’t have let hi drink so much. We’re just going to leave now. Thanks for the lovely tour and sorry about the bushes.” Link grimaced at that bit. “Yeah I’m very sorry about that,’ he added. Wait had she just called him Rhett’s husband why would she think that? Before Link could think about it too much Rhett was walking again taking Link with him. Somehow they made it to the Uber without incident. Rhett helped Link and spoke with the driver while Link just sat there willing himself not to vomit again. “Link?” “Yeah,” Link answered feeling very sleepy all of a sudden. “Driver says it’s gonna be half an hour to the hotel. You just tell me if we need to pull over again okay?” “Sure. Rhett?’ “Yes Link?’ “I’m sleepy.” “That’s just fine you just put you’re head on my shoulder and close your eyes,” “Thanks Rhett,” Link said as he did exactly that. He gave a contented sigh happy to be smelling that Rhett smell again.

The next thing Link really remembers is walking up with a dry mouth, splitting headache and a bladder that’s about to burst. He groans as he sits up in bed. Yes he’s in a bed in his and Rhett’s hotel room. They’re sharing a room because according to Rhett this is the only hotel to stay in, in Paris. It’s also very expensive so they can only afford one room. Two beds at least though. “Hey Link welcome back to the world of the sober. How you feeling?” “Like I’ve been hit by a tuck… twice.” “Sounds about right. Hangovers are a delight. You probably need to pee real bad right about now so why don’t you go do that.’ “I’ll probably pee the bed if I don’t. I’m not even sure that would be the most embarrassing thing I’ve done today.” Link sighs and heaves himself out of bed stumbling to the bathroom. Emptying his bladder helps a little and splashing some cold water on his face helps some too. He walks back to his bed. Rhett has placed a bottle of water and some ibuprofen on his bedside table. “You should take those and drink the water that will help,” Rhett said. “We should also get some food in you. You haven’t eaten all day have you?” Besides a few halfhearted bites of the pancakes at breakfast Link realized he hadn’t had anything but caffeine and alcohol all day. No wonder he’d gotten drunk so fast. “Thanks. What time is it anyway?” “It’s half past five,” “Really? Rhett I’m sorry look like I’m the one who ruined our day not you.” “Don’t worry about it. I think I need to learn to go with the flow more too. I thought we could stay in order room service maybe watch some lame Christmas movie?” “Sounds good to me.”

Link was awakened by the sound of someone knocking at their door. “Don’t worry about that Link I’ll get it,” Rhett said. His blurry figure rushing past Link. “Mmm kay,” he mumbled. He sat up in bed yawning and stretching out his arms. His hands fumbled around the unfamiliar space to find his glasses. He put them on to see Rhett wheeling a cart in between the beds. “Good morning. I took the liberty of ordering breakfast in bed for us. I hope you don’t mind.” “No that sounds good.” “There’s fresh scones with clotted cream and a variety of jams, some fresh fruit ham and cheese quiche and of of course coffee. I got some fresh squeezed OJ for you to since you don’t usually drink coffee.” “Wow Rhett that’s quite the spread. Are you sure we can afford that?” Link asked this hotel was very high end this must have cost a fortune. “Don’t sweat it mon aime consider this an early Christmas present.” Damn Link thinks were they supposed to get each other gifts? Link just thought with the trip they would just forget about it. He’d have to find a way to buy something today without Rhett noticing. “You wanna hear what we’re doing today,” Rhett asked. As he handed a plate to Link and took one himself and began to give himself generous portions of everything on the tray. “Yeah sure.” “ First up is making and decorating gingerbread houses. Then we have to walk through the Christmas market. “What’s a Christmas market?” “So every year these Christmas markets pop up around the city. They have all kinds of vendors selling all kinds of decorations gifts baked goods and street food everything you can think of man they got it.” “Sounds interesting.” What a stroke of good luck. Surely he would be able to find an opportunity to buy something for Rhett there. “Yeah and this one is right close to the Eiffel Tower they have an outdoor skating rink there too.” “I’ve never been skating before,” Link said. “Me neither being a California boy and all. I thought it would be fun.”

It had been a fun day, a perfect day really until it wasn’t. Rhett had lead them to this cooking school not to far from the hotel. Even though neither of them had much experience in the kitchen they worked pretty well together. Even when the bickered over the decoration of their house it was all good natured and if Link got startled every time Rhett invaded his space so what? The afternoon they spent wandering through the crowded Christmas market taking in all the sights and sounds. Who’s too say if the walked a little closer than necessary hands and shoulders brushing against each other sending little shocks of electricity through Link’s body. They had some mouthwatering meat pies,tourtiere, at a street vendor eating them as they walked. As the sun set them came to the outdoor skating rink and saw the Eiffel Tower all lit up in the distance behind it. Skating was decidedly an absolute disaster. Link couldn’t keep his balance at all. He ending up grabbing for Rhett, who was somewhat steadier, and just ended up dragging them both down. And if Link reveled in the feel of their bodies tangling together what was so wrong about that? Also it was cold neither of them was dressed for that. Link teased Rhett for not bringing his fur coat. They laughed. It was like an inside joke with them now. It even began to snow big fat flakes drifting down from the sky. Once both of them had enough of fumbling around on the ice Link left Rhett sitting on a bench. He was supposed to be getting hot chocolate for them. What he was really doing was trying to find a gift for Rhett. He ended up buying him a scarf earmuffs and mittens to go with his coat and some fancy coffee with 24 carat gold flakes in it. Rhett would love that. Things started to go downhill at the hot chocolate stand. The woman serving him spoke to him in english which was far better than Link’s pitiful attempts at french. “You and your husband … you are having good time in Paris yes? It is the city of amour they say.” “Oh he’s not… we’re not married. We’re just friends,” Link answered shaking his head emphatically to try and get his point across. “Sorry my mistake. Here’s your chocolate.” Link thanked her and left. A funny feeling coming over him. Why did someone calling Rhett his husband have this effect on him? He was silent as he sat down next to Rhett and handed him his hot chocolate. When he finished he just sat there holding his empty cup not wanting to look at Rhett. Feeling overwhelmed but not sure why. “Something wrong Link?” Rhett asked. “Why are we here Rhett?” “Are you tired? We can go back now if you want.” “No like why are we here in Paris?” “I’m not sure what this is about,” Rhett said clearly confused. “Are you in love with me Rhett?” “What? Why would you say that?” “Oh I don’t know we’re here in one of the most romantic cities in the world. At Christmas. Or maybe it cause you didn’t correct Emile yesterday when she thought we were husbands.” “I didn’t think you would remember that.” “Well I do,” “Look I just didn’t think it was that important. It’s not like we were ever gonna see her again.” “Forget I asked let’s just go back to the hotel.” Link doesn’t know why he even asked those things. He hadn’t even known he was thinking them. Rhettt tip toed around him for the rest of the evening. Link pretended to be tired just so he could have some space to process everything. Rhett stayed up for awhile quietly watching TV. Eventually he switched if off and went to bed. “Link? Link you awake?” Link didn’t feel like talking so he stayed silent. “I know I avoided answering the question before. But I do Link. Love you that is. That’s why we’re here. I was going to tell you tomorrow but maybe I won’t now.” So that’s why Link was here at 3a.m on Christmas morning wandering the streets of Paris alone. Because he’d freaked out after Rhett’s confession and slipped away when Rhett fell asleep. What the crap was he supposed to think about that. He’d never dated anyone besides Vanessa. If going on two dates and getting dumped for a robot even counted as dating. And even that had been Rhett’s idea. He was always the one pushing Link to try things he never would have on his own. He wasn’t even sure he was capable of falling in love. It seemed like such an intangible concept to Link. How would you even know? Emotions were just so confusing. A sudden wave of weariness washed over Link. If he had to walk one more step he’d collapse for sure. He glanced around the deserted street there was nowhere to sit except the ground. So he slumped against the cold brick wall putting his head between his knees. He was shivering now uncontrollably but not from the cold. Then a heavy weight was draped over his shoulders. He looked up to find Rhett crouched beside him. “I guess you weren’t asleep,” Rhett said. A slight smile on his lips. The weight on his shoulders was that stupid fur coat. “Wait… what?… how did you even find me?” Link stuttered. Rhett waved his phone around. “Got your location on my phone remember?” Damn it Link had forgotten all about that. “Look I didn’t come here to push myself on you or anything. I just got worried when I woke up and you were gone. Looks like I was right to worry cause here you are crying alone and cold on the ground.” He was crying? Link’s hand wiped at his eyes confirming he was indeed crying. “I’m just…so…I’m so confused Rhett. How long?” Link was finding it difficult to speak. His voice was hoarse and his throat felt like it was closing up. Rhett sat down next to him though Link noted not close enough to be touching. “I’m not sure Link. I think I knew from the moment we met that you would be special to me. When it became something more than friendship I can’t say exactly. You sorta sneaked up on me.” There was that timid smile again. Rhett was afraid Link realized. Being vulnerable wasn’t easy for him either. “So what happens now?” he asked. “That’s up to you Link. We can pretend this never happened or we can explore this…us if you want to.” He gestured to himself and Link. “Or you can leave. I’ll understand if this is all too much for you,” He said. He tried to keep his voice even but Link heard the break in it when he said that last option. “I don’t think I can go back to how we were before Rhett. Not with you so close. I’ll always be thinking of the way you smell or the feel of your hand on my back. And how could I forget your body underneath mine solid and yet soft at the same time?” Rhett just stared at him wide eyed mouth open. Link laughed. “You’ve been giving me that look ever since we got here.” “Well you keep surprising me.” “Here’s another one then.” Link leaned over and kissed Rhett. It was a short closed mouth kiss over before it really began. Rhett was blushing when it was over though. “Really Link your sure?” Link kissed him again in reply. Rhett was ready this time putting his hand to Link’s face gently keeping him there. Only to break the kiss seconds later. “Merry Christmas Link.” “Merry Christmas Rhett.”

#mythical secret santa 2019 #type: fic #rating: T #gift swap #rhink #submission

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theprojectatedensgate · 6 years

Note

Part 2 of John losing his memory PLEASE that was such a good story PLEASE MAKE A PART 2!!!!😢😢😂😂😊😊

You’ve waited a long time for it! It’s finally here!

Amnesia Part 2

Part 1

Warnings: Swearing, Graphic Violence

The buzzing of Cicadas outside the cracked window were their only company as their nose was deep in a book. Old, worn and torn, the pages truly displayed its age. The warm orange of a similarly worn lamp lit up the room against the cool tones of the Montana night sky. Cosy? It wasn’t a long enough word to describe the comforting warmth of the room, the beauty of Hope County’s scenery just barely lit under the pale of moonlight. A week since the crash, seven dragging days, though it felt longer, each day of the week dragging by as their radio sat bitterly silent. Anxiety tugged at Rook’s gut as they shared a stealthy glance towards the silent box sat upon their dresser, the glass of ice tea glistening as the condensation dripped downwards forming tiny pools upon the wood.

They shouldn’t care, could they even call it that? The man they had saved from the confines of a wreckage in a forest, the epitome of the depravity of the human race, hell, they weren’t certain he was human at this point. But the law always Rook’s priority they treated him like any police officer would with an endangered civilian. It shocked them, they had the chance right there and then to end the calamity he was bringing about the world in the name of God and his Project, instead choosing the right thing to do, northwards on the moral compass. And after what felt like hours but was only passing minutes, it disappeared into the dark like the promise of meeting up with old friend who became too grown with their adult lives, it simply faded into nothingness. They had heard whispering’s true, muttering conversations of the Cultists that only served to knock the wind from Rook’s gut.

“How is brother John doing now? That crash really set him back.”

“Well, he’s alive, we can give him that much. But he hasn’t been the same. He rarely speaks now, he’s stares at walls like the answer to question he needs is hidden in the cracks. His spirit is gone, all we can do now is pray the God will restore it.”

The bile rose in the Deputy’s throat as the words sunk in, constantly playing over their mind like a botched script. The man was evil, no doubt about. Had it been them from the crash he probably would have finished them off. They despised him, abhorred him completely but even in the depths of hatred born from antagonism, they wouldn’t, they couldn’t, wish such a fate upon him.

A hiss snapped them from thought, the letters of the book dwindling from their concentration. They shot their attention to the source of the night, a familiar bile rising once more to nip at their throat. Rook’s radio. The once silent box now a buzz with life. The interference danced momentarily, before a familiar voice poured from the speakers.

“Deputy.”

Rook took a sharp inhale of breath. He was there, he was speaking, he remembered. They fumbled for the radio, bringing it towards them. Their mouth flopped uselessly as they thought of what to say. Mock him? Ignore him entirely? It was dangerous to speak to the enemy, lest the resistance find out. Gathering their courage, they pushed the button down to speak.

“John.”

A sigh came from the end, Rook rolled their eyes at his pettiness. If he called to gloat, they would just switch the radio off right now.

“My men told me… I was in a crash, my plane suffered a… Technical difficulty. I didn’t believe them, I am one of the best pilots in Hope County, I would even go as far as to say “the”. But they told me that I hit my head, I had landed in some God forsaken part of woodland, alone.”

The Deputy waited for him to continue, waiting for him to come through with a threat of violence. Static hissed in the silence.

“I don’t remember any of it. But they do. They remember getting a call from someone, telling them of my whereabouts. And that’s not suspicious in itself.” Ever the lawyer. “Except who made the call, was the real mystery. Deputy.”

“ Yes, John. I saved you. I saw you crash, I reached your location and called the guards to come get you. It’s all very interesting, I know. I did what I had to do, as an officer.”

He tsked. “You really expect me to believe that?” The last word spat with venom. “After all the innocent people you’ve killed? All the lives you’ve ruined? The families, you’ve torn apart? It took me a week to get back to normal, but I’m not stupid.”

“What do you think? That I rescued you because I care in some way? I did it because my conscious wouldn’t let me get away with it, it was the right thing to do.”

“The right thing to do… Intriguing. And how did the resistance fair once you told them of your heroic endeavour? Were they pleased? Did you get a parade?”

Rooks knuckles turned white as they gripped the radio, squeezing the plastic. They had to keep calm, this is what John did, what he always would do. Provoke.

“I didn’t tell em’.”

There was a silence, and John chuckled lightly on the end, confusion nestling into the Deputy’s mind.

“You didn’t tell them of your bravery? Why would you deprive them of such a thing?”

“Because- Because I would have been shot that’s why. Hope County Deputy saves sadistic Baptist of Eden’s Gate, John Seed? I would have been executed.”

John hummed through the speakers. “Good titles. But, I thought you were doing the right thing, Deputy.”

“It was.”

“So, if it was the “right thing” then why would the Resistance in all it’s morality and cause for “good.” execute you, for doing the right thing?”

Rook paused. An uncomfortable understanding sunk in. It was a good question, surely they would be praised on rescuing a man despite their difference, putting the war aside to save them. But the Deputy had witness what happened to “traitors”, lining them up against the wall and dropping them one by one. A sickness spread through their abdomen at the images of grey matter sprayed against the walls. An amused chuckle broke their thought.

“You can’t even give me an answer for that. Because you know, just as well as me, the Resistance isn’t all it’s made out to be.”

“You know what? Fuck this. I’m going. I’m not wasting my time listening to you rant on about the war.”

“But you’re the ones who started this war. Why start it if you cannot commit? All we wanted, was you all to say Yes to the Project and Yes to God. The Resistance wanted a war, they always have. Look at what you just confessed to me, you cannot let them know of an innocent, life saving deed because it will cost you your life. People who kill at any slight of opinion. People who desire control.”

“That sounds a lot like you and your cult, John.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

“Okay, no. Enough. You’re not going to convert me so stop right there. I saved your life but that doesn’t mean I’m one of you!”

“There’s that wrath. Always so eager for conflict, just like your friends. Hmmm, you know what they need? To see how much of a martyr their Deputy is. They would be over joyed at hearing about your rescue mission.”

The Deputy narrowed their eyes. He was blackmailing them. Shame washed over them, they should have expected it, moral obligation over took their judgement.

“Are you blackmailing me?”

“Deputy, that’s a nasty word to use, we’re reaching an agreement, a deal if you would. I bought you something, my way of saying thank you, I would like you to meet me, tomorrow, sundown, at the Lamb of God church, alone. Don’t bring any of your Resistance friends, Boomer is an exception of course. I’ll give you my thank you present and we can both be on our way, we will never speak of it again.”

“You bought me something?” Rook groaned, reaching a hand to rub against their forehead. “How do I know this isn’t a trap? You really think because I saved you that I trust you? I don’t, not in the slightest.”

“You have my word.”

They could almost hear the grin as he spoke. They sighed as they reality of their situation hit them. They would have to go meet him, then this whole thing could be forgotten, like John’s memory of that night. They would go armed of course, and they wouldn’t wait around, making a quick exit.

“Fine. If you try anything I swear your God and mine, I will kill you. I won’t even hesitate.”

John tittered, his laughter vibrating through the speaker. “Of course you will. I’ll see you soon, Deputy.”

The static ended and the room was plunged into silence, the gentle whispers of leaves blowing in the wind and late night insects providing the backing track. They lay flat on the bed now, the book splayed open on their chest. It was a bad idea, the whole thing was tainted. The youngest brother never did anything that he wouldn’t benefit from. But this was Rook, they had taken on hundreds of Cultists and lived to see the next day, they could handle themselves. So when tomorrow comes, and the sun starts to set, they’ll be ready. They will take the gift and leave. Done and dusted.

And it would all be Forgotten.

Thank for requesting!

#Far cry 5 #farcry5 #fc5 #request #writing #fic #John x Deputy #John Seed #Deputy

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fanfic-collection · 6 years

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Pirates: Loki x Reader - Ch 1

It's the 17th century, Loki and Thor have been sent to Midgard to track down a rogue ice sorceress, they're trying to blend in with humans so their powers are as hidden as they can manage. The ice sorceress became a pirate and trusts no one. To gain her trust, the brothers have become pirates in their own right. (Alternate timeline where Loki knows his true heritage at this point in history but is deeply ashamed of it, he and Thor are on good terms. )

“And you're certain these are the coordinates?” Loki muttered, holding still the ship's wheel.

The first mate nodded enthusiastically, a look of nervousness on his features, fearful of disappointing his captain. “Aye, sir, this was the direction she was headed.”

Loki nodded, his gaze turning towards the horizon.

“You really think she'll show?” Heavy footsteps echoed up the stairs to the raised platform where Loki stood, guiding the ship. A blonde crown of hair appeared, followed by the rest of the muscular man.

“It's the only lead we have, brother.”

“And why are you captain again?” Thor asked, his eyes twinkling jovially.

Loki smirked, sliding his hand along the wide brim of his cavalier hat. The hat was gold, even the feather, matching the accents of his green and black outfit. Two tiny triangle flaps of material lined the crown of his hat, if only faintly resembling horns. He missed his normal helmet but this one was far more conducive to their current work and still bore a resemblance to his horned motif. “Because I'm clearly the better pilot.”

“For seafaring vehicles.” Thor muttered, shielding his eyes from the harsh sunlight. His long blonde hair hung in ringlets to his shoulders, resting on the smooth muscled skin. His long red velvet coat he normally wore for formal occasions was missing, clearly discarded in his quarters. Instead he wore a blue sleeveless shift, brown trousers and thick leather boots that rose to his knees. His outfit was one of practicality.

Loki wore a long green coat with tails that fell to his knees, flared out at the back, black leather kneehigh boots and a black button-up tunic, buttoned to his throat and pinned with an ebony gem. His long black hair was loosely tied back, preventing the wind from whipping it into his face. Across his chess lay crisscrossing black belts, sheathed with a half dozen daggers. Loki's muscles shifted easily to the swaying of the boat as he guided the ship lazily, an easy air about him. He was leaner than Thor, that was apparent, but his muscles were tightly wound coils able to hold the ship still in even the fiercest of storms.

“Leave us, Pons.” Loki dismissed the first mate.

Pons bowed his head and scurried off.

Thor walked over and stood shoulder to shoulder with Loki, his back facing the rest of the ship's deck as the many workers scurried about. “I'm not sure I'm fond of this scoundrel life, it's lacking honor.”

Loki smirked again, eyes slitted against the wind, “Come now brother, you seemed quite fond of our missive when it involved loading the cannons.”

Thor glanced over at Loki for a moment, a thoughtful look on his face as he once more turned his head to watch the horizon. The deep blue ocean went on forever, as far as he could see, no sign of land in sight. “I will admit that was fun.”

“And you do love your battles.”

“You seem to love the stealing far more than you should.” Thor retorted.

“We're stealing from corrupt nobility, paying honest sailors a living wage that they can't get anywhere else. They would be next to slaves if they were on so called honest ships.”

“We are nobility.” Thor grumbled.

Loki rolled his eyes, “Not here. And you'll forgive me if I find ways to enjoy myself while we look for her.”

Thor sighed, “Yes, the rage of battle even on such a location as these ships we moor is diverting.”

“You enjoy it.”

“I do.”

“Now then, what was it that you wanted to talk to me about?”

“One of the lookouts thought he saw fog in the distance, that is her thing, yes?”

Loki nodded stiffly, “They didn't call out?”

“They weren't sure if it was an incoming storm or something else. You know how wary the sailors get of witchcraft.”

“Well if it's not you, and it's not natural,” Loki trailed off, glancing pointedly at Thor.

“Captain!” A voice cried out from the lookout tower. “Fog on the horizon!”

“It's not me.” Thor muttered, “And it's not natural.”

“We've been at this for two years now.” Loki peeled his gaze towards the horizon where a dense fog was slowly rolling in. A dark shadow loomed from the mists as the fog drew closer.

Thor turned around, following Loki's gaze. “You were right about her not trusting us. Surely it would have been easier to just disguise ourselves as nobility and let her rob us.”

Loki shrugged, “This was more enjoyable, a respite from home. Besides, I didn't want to take chances, we don't know anything about her crew that they would trust someone so obviously using magic and who knows the extent of her powers.”

Thor grunted, “I could take her.”

“She's a powerful sorceress brother, we don't know the extent of what we're dealing with and neither you nor I can breathe under water. I want all the advantages we can have.”

Scowling, Thor's eyes darkened irritably, “You sound like you admire her.”

“If she were a great muscly brute like you, I'm sure your interest would be piqued, as it is, this is my area of expertise, I can't help a small amount of curiosity.”

“What exactly is your plan again?”

“We make an ally of her, perhaps she will return home willingly. Besides, there was no limit on how long we were given to apprehend her, perhaps she can be amenable to our ways. Asgard could use a powerful sorceress to defend it.”

The fog now surrounded the ship, slowly blocking out the sun. In the distance, it was becoming obvious that the large shadowy object was indeed an approaching ship. The sailors on Loki and Thor's vessel scurried about nervously.

“Hold steady!” Loki called, raising his voice that he might be heard over the whipping wind. The sailors pulled and tugged at various ropes and cords, some running below deck to check the cannons and assemble various weapons.

Thor touched the hammer fastened to his waist. A curious weapon for a sailor but the one he was best with. Though it had been enchanted to hide any runes or obvious markings of its true nature.

Now the fog swelled over the boat, snaking its thick tendrils along the deck and blocking the view of Loki's men. He could barely make out Thor standing a few steps from him.

“Pons, hold the wheel.” Loki ordered loudly.

A few moment's later, the first mate came stumbling up the stairs and over to Loki, taking the captain's spot at the ship's wheel.

“Which direction?” Pons stammered.

“Just hold her steady.” Loki muttered.

Pons bobbed his head.

A great black shadow loomed before them, floating lazily over to the side of the ship. Then as suddenly as the fog had sprung up, it vanished.

A massive vessel, almost twice the size as Loki and Thor's ship loomed beside them. A crew of fierce, ugly men, they looked more like trolls than actual men, stood gathered on the edge of the opposite ship. Their weapons were all drawn, various clubs, cudgels, swords, and blades. They glared menacingly at the ship.

Loki walked down the stairs from the captain's wheel, making his way to the point where a plank might be tossed and the two vessels' occupants could meet. Thor followed slowly after him.

Walking with a calm, easy strut, Loki stopped among his gathered crew, his own men glaring back at the crew of the other ship.

“Who are you?” One of the trolllike men growled, a rag wrapped around his head. Loki guessed he was the firstmate.

“I am Loki, captain of the Black Raven, my brother Thor, co-captain.” He tilted his head in the direction of Thor. Thor raised his hand in greeting. “We seek the captain of the Plomour.”

“Do you now?” A cold voice called. The troll men parted and a woman stood among their ranks. You.

Your men parted around you as you walked over to the edge of your ship, stopping just before the rails. You clasped your hands behind your back and scanned the opposite ship. You had heard of the Black Raven, the captains were the most deadly in battle and the younger of the two was said to be an excellent tactician, but that seemed to be the extent. For as much as you were shrouded in mystery, they were too. They had only been raiding noble vessels for a few years, appearing as if overnight fully stocked with their own vessel. Such an occurrence was surely a cause for suspicion.

You wore a long blue doublet, kneehigh white boots – somehow kept pristine throughout years of ocean travel, a deep blue cavalier hat, and icy blue gloves. A long deadly looking scabbard, bedecked with silver trimmings hung at your waist.

The man in the gold hat with long black hair and fierce green eyes stared at you intently.

“I am the captain of the Plomour. You called?”

#Loki x reader #multi chapter

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oscars-dumbass-central · 1 year

Text

Martyn's lost a lot, he's in debt to the shittiest bartender he ever met. He's just in debt generally if he had to admit it.

So when a random man comes up to him, and suggests the universe's stupidest plan he might as well agree.

A crew of four people who all barely know each other, but have all lost someone, and together? They might find those someones again.

Or/ a sci-fi AU with messy relationships, too much polyamory, and a piece of junk for a ship.

Words: 875

Chapter One: I'd be more peaceful being dead

The warmth of the whiskey was the only warmth that Martyn had felt for far too long. He stared down into his glass and watched the beautiful deep amber liquid swirl around what was probably far too large ice cube. It looked pretty, but it burnt as he swallowed it down in a single heartbeat. He guessed that the burning was what he deserved.

He had left, he had run, now all that was waiting for him was the cold of a shitty tiny bed and the burning heat off the cheapest whiskey at the cheapest bar. God he was—

“This seat free?” A loud voice broke through his thoughts and started him from staring down at the slowly melting ice cube any longer. Glancing up he saw a ram hybrid wearing a heavy white coat gesturing towards the seat next to him.

“Uh, yeah?”

“Great,” the ram hybrid smiled as he sat cross legged on the tall stool — how was he even doing that? “So I’ve heard you’re pretty good with a certain set of skills,” his fingers danced across his legs constantly, the man refusing to sit still for even a single breath. “I am in need of those skills and it seems you might be in need of some money.”

“I’m not-”

“I asked the bartender and you owe him 316.5 chips,“ he smiled a stupidly fucking charming smile.

Glaring at the man, Martyn grabbed another glass from where the bartender had placed it, removing his empty one sometime during the time the man had been talking. “I am not looking for work.”

“I’m not asking to hire you,” he sighed and rolled his eyes, leaning an elbow on the sticky counter. “I am asking for your help to steal something.”

“But-”

“I know you are also looking for a certain someone — I don’t know who, don’t worry — I am also looking for my people,” something in the man’s expression made Martyn believe he was being honest, it might’ve been the first thing he actually paid attention to the entire conversation. “I’ve got a pilot, I know how to fix up a ship, I just need one.”

“You’re asking me to steal a ship.”

“Yes!” There was that stupid fucking smile again. “Exactly, now, come along, I’m sure we can find one in not too bad of condition.”

“Really, you want that one, it’s a piece of junk!” Martyn scowled at the ship — it was barely even one if you had to ask him — which the ram hybrid had brought him to. The thing was rusted to Hels and back and was missing at least three of its engines.

“Exactly, no-one will notice once it’s gone!” He punched Martyn lightly on his arm, “So c’mon, teach me how to steal it!” He smiled so brightly and blindingly that it was slightly annoying.

“You know if your pilot even knows how to fly this style?” It was a fucking old ship, no professionally trained pilots would know how to fly something that fucking old.

Shrugging, the ram hybrid went back to staring at the ship with almost literal stars in his eyes. “He says he knows his way around older stuff, grew up on a farming planet apparently.”

Oh great, the pilot was a fucking farmer. There was no way he’d be able to even get the ship off the ground. “If you’re sure,” he sighed. “There are a few ways to steal a ship: fly away with it; shove it in a bigger ship; or carry it out piece by piece to rebuild it somewhere else,” No-one in their right mind would ever choose the third option, it was pretty much impossible and you’d get caught immediately. So of course the ram hybrid chose the third option. Fucking hels.

God, every single muscle in Martyn’s body was screaming in pain as he lugged another crate filled with metal and shit he didn’t understand. The followed behind the ram hybrid — who still hadn’t given his name — who was holding a tiny crate filled with pretty much nothing down pathways that he could’ve sworn didn’t exist a couple days ago.

“Where are we even taking this shit?” He grunted, readjusting the heavy crate as he kicked shut a door behind them.

“I’ve got a friend who’s agreed to help us build the ship in return for us bringing him with us,” he explained as they walked, “He’s got a friend who owns a shop that he’s renting out for us.”

“How do we know we can trust him?”

The ram hybrid went quiet for a few seconds — thank fuck — before responding, “He’s trying to find someone, like we are.”

“Oh,” How was he supposed to respond to that? How was anyone supposed to respond to that? “That… uh… that sucks?”

Snorting, the ram hybrid clicked on a button on an intercom they had wandered up to. “Doc, we’re here.”

“Password?” a deep voice grumbled out through the heavy static buzz.

“Seventy-seven,” he rolled his eyes, “I really don’t know why you insisted on a password.” The heavy roller door slowly opened incredibly loudly and creaked open and Martyn stumbled back in shock when he saw who — what? — was standing there. “What the fuck—”

#og oscar #oscar's writing #hermitcraft #trafficblr #hermitblr #traffic #martyn #zedaph #in the little wood #zedaphplays #third life smp

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carlottastudios · 6 years

Text

OzGlyn Week Day 6: Home

(OzGlyn Family AU)

The night was blissfully quiet, save for a single ship flying over the countryside of Vale. It was a relatively small, if a bit bulky, craft from Atlas whose only passengers were the pilot and, in the cargo hold amongst the crates of dust, two hunters, trying their best to keep from falling asleep despite their exhaustion. The hunters in question were professor Ozpin, headmaster of Beacon Academy, and his wife and vice-headmistress, Glynda Goodwitch. At the moment, however, the proud and strong huntsman and huntress who’d help put down the leader of the grimm and who remained two of the greatest warriors yet living didn’t quite look the part. Then again, if you had just completed a mission in the northern outskirts of Atlas to track and eliminate the laboratories of a certain criminal scientist, ending with an arduous battle that lasted the better part of a day, you wouldn’t look your best either.

It had taken them two whole weeks to complete the mission, but in the end, it felt at least somewhat worth it. Salem’s last followers were being taken away, Dr. Watts’ dangerous experiments had been destroyed and there was one less distasteful person holding influence in the kingdom of Atlas. Ozpin and Glynda were not blind to these victories, far from it. But two weeks was a long time to be away from Vale, from home and hearth and family, and they wouldn’t be at ease until they had returned to Beacon. They were so impatient to get back that they declined General Ironwood’s offer to escort them in his ship, choosing instead to hire a pilot, with a cargo airship bound for their kingdom anyway, to fly them home that very night. One generous amount of lien later and they collapsed on the floor of their transport as it took off. And when I say “collapsed”, I’m not exaggerating. Both Ozpin and Glynda had sustained many injuries in the fight and had stayed in Atlas just long enough for them to be adequately patched up. A decision that Glynda was starting to second-guess. She looked down at her right arm, bound in a sling and still faintly throbbing with the memory of Hazel Reinart’s grip nearly snapping the bones in half. She wouldn’t be fixing anything with her semblance any time soon. She frowned, feeling the bandages covering almost half of her face tighten on her skin as she did. She probably wouldn’t be doing anything any time soon. Nothing useful at least. On the one hand, it irritated her; she hated feeling so…helpless like this. On the other hand, she was so spent of energy that the promise of not having to do anything for a short while was a bit of a relief.

She looked over at her husband. His eyes were closed, but he wasn’t sleeping. She could tell by the tightness in his jaw and slight flare in his nostrils every time he breathed, as if he were in pain. Given their condition, it was very likely. For her part, her broken rib was still resonating with mild agony in her torso. The field medics had strapped several bags of ice over it, but it did little to ease her suffering. Glynda, however, refused to say a word about it. Instead, she moved her free hand over to Ozpin’s and he grasped it tightly in silent thanks.

“We should probably spend the night in the infirmary when we get there.” she said out loud, her voice hoarse.

Ozpin let out the smallest of groans at her words. She could sympathize all too well with his displeasure. After two weeks sleeping on tiny cots out in the frozen wilderness, a night in their own room and in their own bed was long overdue. But they couldn’t just neglect their wounds, much as they had managed to ignore them until now (for the most part at least, her right shoulder was still stinging). They needed proper treatment if they were ever going to recover in a feasible amount of time and the sooner said treatment started, the better.

“You should at least have your leg looked over.” the huntress added, glancing at Ozpin’s left leg.

It had been lacerated by Tyrian Callows’ wrist blades, leaving a long bloody line tracing up from just above his ankle almost to the back of his knee.

“It was already looked over.” he said, nodding at the bandages concealing the gash.

‘Barely,’ Glynda thought critically.

Out loud, she said:

“I trust the staff at Beacon more than I trust Atlesian field medics.”

She frowned up at him.

“And you were limping when we left the battlefield.” she added. “Don’t deny it, Oz.”

She didn’t mention that he’d nearly fallen down every time he’d tried to walk and, in the end, that he’d had to lean on her in order to move anywhere at all. The thought of the headmaster being rendered so unsteady, almost fragile, troubled her enough; she had no desire to remind him of it. Ozpin opened his eyes. His dark amber orbs, which had only hours before been bright with restless obstinacy, held a subdued look in them.

“I won’t. And to soothe you, beloved,” he said, “I’ll go to the infirmary.”

Glynda smiled.

“Good,”

“But only” he added, smirking, “if you’ll join me.”

His wife sighed. Somehow, she’d known that had been coming. It only figured he would make her suffer, so to speak, with him (though in truth she wouldn’t have it any other way).

“First, we check on the children.” she said.

He smiled.

“Of course.”

Of all the things they’d missed while away, they’d longed for them the most, as any parents would. For a while the two were silent, thinking about them. Then Glynda’s face turned melancholy.

“I don’t want them to see us like this.” she said, so quiet Ozpin almost hadn’t heard her.

He frowned, understanding why she wanted that. Oscar, Ria and Tia had never seen them wounded before. To see them as they were now, not only injured, but grievously so, would be nothing if not a great shock. Yet it was one they’d have to face eventually, and to delay it seemed less than worthwhile when all was said and done.

“All children have to learn that their parents are not invincible.” he said softly to Glynda.

“But it’s not an easy lesson already.” she answered. “Nor a very pleasant one.”

Ozpin nodded. Glynda would know better than anyone how hard a lesson of your own parents’ vulnerability could be. He glanced back at her. Her eyes were downcast and heavy with sadness, no doubt from memories being stirred up from their resting places where she’d tried so hard to keep them.

“I don’t want to upset them.” she whispered.

“Neither do I.” Ozpin assured, putting an arm around her, gently so as not to jostle her sling.

When her expression still didn’t lighten, he added:

“If we’re in luck, Bart and Oobleck will have already gotten them to bed long before now. It is very much past their bedtime as I recall.”

This made Glynda smile.

“If we’re in luck,” she said fondly, “they won’t have let them run amuck while we were gone.”

Ozpin chuckled.

“I’m not sure even we are that lucky.” he said, and they both shared a quiet laugh.

At that moment, they heard the voice of the pilot from the bridge:

“Alright, professors, we’re here. So, if you’re falling asleep back there, I’d suggest you start waking up, because we’ll be pretty landing soon.”

Glynda felt her heart flutter in her chest like a bird’s. She looked up towards one of the cargo hold’s small windows and, indeed, she could see that they were starting to descend. They were so close now, so close to really and truly being back now that a rush of bubbling excitement was sent shooting through her veins, making her feel wide awake. She sat up, with only a little difficulty thanks to her arm, and was quickly on her feet. Ozpin was not quite a quick, though, and had to lean against the wall behind him to lift himself shakily up. However, as soon as he put weight on his bad leg, he nearly crumpled back to the floor, a hiss of pain escaping between his teeth, and might’ve fallen completely if Glynda hadn’t caught him. She stared at him fearfully with wide jade green eyes, and only let out her breath once he met her gaze.

“Sorry,” he murmured, but she shook her head.

He had nothing to apologize for, especially not here and not now.

“Let me help you.” she pleaded softly.

He did and, with him draping an arm on her shoulder and grasping his cane tightly, the two walked over to the rear door. As he used his cane to aid in his movement, Ozpin let out a small self-deprecating chuckle.

“It seems I might actually have a use for this cane outside of battle after all.” he said.

They held onto each other as the ship came to a gentle stop, thanked the pilot once again, then stepped out. The ship took off barely a few moments later, leaving a small breeze in its wake. The professors waited until it was out of sight, then turned to look up at the school. What a sight for sore it was: the courtyard lined with its trees and light-poles, lit now with a soft green glow and shining the pathway to the school like small stars, leading to the familiar peaked towers, black against the midnight sky.

“I forgot how beautiful it is.” Ozpin murmured.

Glynda turned to him. He was staring at the tower with all the longing of the homesick finally returning to their abode. She smiled.

“Well, now you have a reminder.” she said.

Ozpin smiled at her, and her own widened at the joy in his face.

“Welcome home.” Glynda whispered, reaching up just enough to brush her lips to his cheek.

The small peck made a light blush blossom on Ozpin’s face, though it was too difficult to see in the dark.

“It’s good to be home.”

#ozglynweek #day 6 home #I know I know I'm late compared to how early I posted my other entries I'm sorry!!!#I made the mistake of not preparing this post in advance #forgive me!!!#on the plus side yay! it's done!#I've been looking forward to this entry!#partly because it introduces an AU I've thought of for RWBY #one where as you can guess from the note at the beginning ozpin and Glynda have a family #I'll post more information about this AU later on deviantART for those who are interested #ok shameless plug over #Behold My Beautiful Little Brain Child (my original post)#Drabble-y Brain Child (my writing)#Literally Everything Else (other)

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cupcakemolotov · 7 years

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The Ache of You (Beneath my Skin) Part One

A big, big thank you to @accidental-rambler who so very kindly told me that this did not suck and did some very fast spot checking since I am writing on my phone, per usual. All remaining mistakes are mine!

This story follows this drabble but you don’t have to read it to understand, it just gives this story some context. This going to be Jyn/Cassian, so please do not read if that pairing bothers you. I am also going to hopefully be going heavy on the BroTP that is Jyn/Bodhi/Cassian. :)

Hoth was a frozen hell.

The first few days Jyn had spent in its icy corridors, shivering until she'd have sworn her teeth had cracked, she'd welcomed the discomfort. The cold seemed like penance for her audacity to live. She'd laid in her bunk, wrapped in every piece of clothing she’d been given, her thin pillow pulled over her head, knees tucked into her chin, and she’d counted her breaths until her fingers and toes thawed.

It was taking less time each night, generators and sheer determination turning the base into something livable. Each day was a slow grind, the low impact work Jyn did as mindless as the rest of her was numb. She'd gotten good at catching sleep where she could, and so she dozed in snatches, never quite drifting off, unwilling to face her nightmares. Eventually, exhaustion would catch up and she'd wake frozen in her bed, limbs locked in silent horror, her mind's betrayal harsh in her throat.

But if the nightmares weren't getting better, they were becoming familiar and no longer did she press her face into her blankets to muffle her tears. She hadn't cried since Saw had abandoned her at sixteen. She’d stood drenched and angry, with her tears locked somewhere she couldn't reach them, after Eadu. But her first nightmare after Scarif, Cassian's blood still a warm memory on her lips, and she'd cried like a child.

Her last clear memory of Cassian was of a face pale with exhaustion and blood loss, the way his fingers had slipped away from the cuff of her jacket as he collapsed. Her dizzy panic and desperate calls as she crashed to the ground next him, vision greying due to her own injuries. She’d woken alone, the only tangible memory that everything hadn't been a nightmare was the necklace around her throat and the lingering ache in her ankle she couldn't shake.

Cassian was alive, but no one would tell her more. Bodhi was a name no one knew, demands for the pilot’s status falling on deaf ears. It wasn't that they were unsympathetic, but she wasn't one of them. For someone who had spent a lifetime not belonging, she'd never resented it so thoroughly.

But Jyn was nothing but stubborn, and so she'd set her teeth and locked away the rage and impotent frustration that got her nowhere. Saw had taught her to hold, until the damn broke and she couldn't hold anymore. How to tie up her emotions, lock them away and face what she could and slowly chop away at the things she couldn't.

But Jyn hadn't realized how much of herself she was pushing down and out, until she saw Bodhi.

Perhaps it would be best to say that Bodhi had found her, hobbling on a healing leg so similar to her own, face tired and worn and hollow at the edges. But his fingers had been warm as he grasped her hand, lips compressed for a long second as he breathed. Almost as if he'd needed to see her, to know that she was real.

I'm the pilot.

“They said you were okay,” Bodhi murmured finally, eyes skating across her face as he shivered. “When we woke and you weren't there. They didn't say they'd sent you to the bowels of hell.”

Jyn grinned a little, startled, and didn't have the urge to rip her hand free, to jerk away from human contact. This was Bodhi. They weren't friends, not yet. Whatever threads connected her to him, the borrowed time they shared, it wasn't something as easy or simple as friendship. But, Jyn thought, maybe that's where she was wrong. Maybe it was friendship, she just hadn't known it could burn like this.

“Have you eaten?”

Bodhi shook his head, huddled a little tighter into his jacket, jaw locked. “I'm worried I'll crack my teeth.”

That flash of humor, the downward angle of his eyebrows, and Jyn shrugged to hide her amusement. The frayed, unraveled parts of Bodhi seemed to be reknitting. She could see the trauma lingering in the tightness of his eyes, the uncomfortable way he stood so far into the open, but she too, knew that trauma intimately.

“It's better than being cold and hungry. Come on, let's find you a jacket, and see about getting you some of the Tauntaun piss they’re calling caf around here.”

Bodhi frowned a little, falling into step next her. “What's a Tauntaun?”

Jyn patted his shoulder, only the slight jerkiness giving way to her unfamiliarity of the motion. It was less comfort than something bracing, but Bodhi straightened beneath it anyway. Just a little. She grinned, mouth curving just slightly upwards, and watched Bodhi from beneath her lashes.

“What's a frozen hell without a few creatures?”

There were ghosts on Hoth. Not terrible ones, for only stubborn things survived in this cold, and some nightmares had more sense. But the hallways were an endless loop and daylight was a blistering curse with its frozen sky. She thought having ghosts was fitting for a placed named Echo Base.

Jyn had named them - Baze, Chirrutt, and at her most uncharitable, K2. But that wasn't quite right, because it was K2 she found herself talking to most often inside her head, as she chipped away at ice. The droid who had become ingrained in her internal monologue.

Would you like to know the odds of succeeding in digging this tunnel by hand?

Jyn Erso, you could remove fifteen percent more ice if you simply used proper equipment.

Why would I haul ice? My joints would freeze.

Jyn didn't know what it meant that she found it easier to talk to the dead than the living. She never had before. She’d watched her mother die, had held her father as death rattled in his throat, and had stared silently at Saw’s death pyre of rock and ruin. They lingered at the hollow edges of her conscious sometimes, but it was Baze she expected to see in a shadow, and low murmur of a prayer that she rasped beneath her breath in between tired steps had never belonged to her.

Grief and guilt did strange things to a person’s mind, and she carried her weight in both.

She did her best to ignore the emptiness at her back, the cold line of her spine.

But Jyn realized that she was still adjusting to this strange thing of caring for the living as she watched Bodhi eye the gruel in front him with compressed lips and unsteady hands. The careful way he avoided looking directly at people, as if they'd know what he had been, left her fingers clenched on top of her thighs.

She'd grown used to the odd stares, the watchfulness as she was given grunt task after another. She wasn't quite officially a rebel, and her family legacy was thick in the air here. Alderaan was a whisper, a jagged breath that never quite shook loose, and Jyn wondered if their ghosts could scream at her across the void too.

Not fast enough. Not soon enough. Millions and millions dead, with only a single, bitter hope that a single weakness could be exploited. That her father had not failed them.

At least here, she didn't have to look at the stars and wonder. If death came, she'd be blind to it.

But there was an edge to the mess now, and Jyn hated it. Chin set, she stared back, until people looked away. Without Bodhi, none of them would have the tiny flicker of hope they had, and this icy hell would certainly have been their tombs. If her presence reminded them of that, then so be it.

“Not everyone joins the Empire because they want too,” Bodhi said suddenly, chin jerking up, spoon clenched tightly between his fingers. “Not everyone believes.”

Jyn said nothing at first, because she wasn't certain what she could say. Her father had run and been caught, what chance did someone like Bodhi have? But here Bodhi sat, half frozen and stiff from injuries, lips tightly compressed, and so she tried.

“I know.”

He blinked, a ripple of something moving across his skin, and then he tucked himself beneath the curve of his shoulders and took a careful bite. The edges of his mouth twisted, and she might have smiled.

“You get used to it.”

Bodhi sighed. “Cassian said something like that. Medfood isn't better.”

Jyn attempted nonchalance, but her ability to breathe disappeared. Cassian. Cassian said. Emotion she couldn't name crawled into her lungs, her throat, until it nearly choked her. Struggling for her next breath, she managed it, but barely. “How is he?”

Her words were flat, the heavy strain nearly absent from her voice, but when Bodhi looked up, his eyes said she'd given enough away. Once, that might have bothered her, that she could be so easily read. But she found with Bodhi, she didn't mind as much.

“Alive,” Bodhi says carefully, swallowing. “His back..”

Jyn looked away, teeth clenched to stop her demands. Bodhi took another bite, stared intently at his gruel.

“He said to tell you not to worry.”

Her gaze darted back to his, teeth catching the tip of her tongue to stop her from letting words spill out. She tried not to think of the way his fall had echoed, each reverberating slam of Cassian’s body vibrating through her fingertips. The damage he'd wrought on himself, climbing after her, saving them both.

“The hospital was evacuated,” Bodhi said at last, catching her gaze. “Bacta tanks aren't easy to relocate…”

She sat still for several long moments, thinking through the things Bodhi didn't want to tell her. Somewhere, Cassian was struggling with injuries bad enough they'd kept him with the bacta tanks, even as the rebel base had moved fast to escape the possibility of the Death Star.

“Thank you,” Jyn says finally, pulse uneven in her ears.

Bodhi nodded and set about finishing his meal with quick urgency. “He was mad, you know.”

She blinked, arched both brows. “Who was?”

“Cassian,” he shoved his empty bowl away, grinned a little. “It's hard to tell, but when we found out you'd been sent here instead of put in the med bay, he was angry.”

It did something funny to her chest, knowing that Cassian had reacted to her absence and she licked chapped lips. “My injuries weren't as bad.”

A lopsided grin. “So we were told.”

Cassian hadn't cared. Ignoring that thought for later, she nodded towards the hallway. “You need to be somewhere?”

“They'll find me when they need me. You?”

“Back to digging,” she said with a shrug. Maybe the basic job should’ve frustrated her, but Jyn was used to manual labor. She was terrible at being still, and this gave her something to do. At least, that's what she told herself when the frustration and anger tightened her lungs and closed her throat.

She was a thief. She had no patience for orders she couldn't trust. Maybe Saw had seen that in her, all those years ago. But her life had been filled with other people’s hard choices and her own refusal to commit. What had she told Saw?

It's easy if you don't look up.

Well, she was growing more comfortable with this crick in her neck every day, her eyes watching and assessing. She blamed Cassian, her father. Both had turned this fight into something personal, no longer could she allow it to be something abstract, a political thought.

I’ve been in this fight since I was six years old.

But where did a girl who lived her life running fit into a rebellion?

Sometimes she dreamed of eerie green light. Of a terrible silence and roaring in the distance, as the horizon disappeared. What did a world sound like, when it died?

Captain Cassian Andor arrived at Echo Base on a wave of news. Hot and cold beneath her thick jacket, Jyn stared at him as he stepped carefully into the mess. In her ears was shouting, jumbled words she understood but couldn't process, fingers trembling.

Luke Skywalker.

Deathstar.

Cassian was here.

He looked thin, still too pale, spine carefully straight as he looked towards her and Bodhi unerringly. As if he'd known where to find them. As if he'd expected they'd be here, impatiently waiting for him. Her lungs seized, eyes unblinking as they watched each other, relief and need a tangle in her chest.

Jyn had seen Cassian angry and determined. She'd faced him down when he wore both lies and truth on his face, had caught that rare curve of an almost smile when she surprised him. But the look behind his eyes as a cheering crowd separated them, it was different. It reminded her of before Scarif.

Welcome home. I’m here.

It looked like a promise.

General Draven stood behind him, and impatiently motioned for them to continue down the hallway. Cassian’s mouth tightened at the corners, eyes dark and narrow as his jaw clenched for a single breath, but then he turned away. Jyn watched him move, nails digging into the table in front of her, breathing ragged.

Cassian. Alive and walking, and nothing about him spoke of rejection. Just that same, steady strength mingled with the need that lived beneath her fingertips. Whatever this was she wasn't alone, hadn't been alone since Yavin V and the strength of his fingers against hers.

He kept coming back.

Bodhi touched her hand, and her gaze darted to him. His eyes were bright, fingers trembling faintly against her own. “We did it.”

For a moment, Jyn didn't understand his words. When she realized what he meant, she let it roll over her, the impact shockwaves of landing after a high fall. Her bones ached with it.

They'd won. They'd won. The Death Star was gone. Her father’s legacy was now tangled up with Luke Skywalker’s and the spacejunk the Death Star left behind. It's terrible legacy would be nothing but stardust one day, and it wouldn't be her.

Cassian was here.

Stepping forward, Jyn hugged Bodhi. He went stiff and uncertain, fingers jerky against her back. Then his grip tightened, body leaning towards her instead of away. They felt like jagged pieces of different puzzles, and Jyn didn't care.

“Papa would be proud of you,” she whispered into his shoulder.

Bodhi trembled, and something like liberation left her shaky. The burden of her childhood, her father's desperation were over. Whatever the future held for her, it would be one of her making, and she'd never tasted freedom so sweet.

The last person Jyn expected to meet roaming the halls was General Rieekan. She'd seen him of course, Echo Base was still too small for people to go unnoticed, but she'd never run across him alone. She remembered with a jolt that he was from Alderaan, and her throat tightened. She cursed the wild, nervous energy that had made it impossible to sleep, this unfamiliar need clawing at her guts.

She wasn’t certain what she'd hoped to find, although a tiny, vibrant thought ran along lines she couldn't allow herself to consider. Cassian would probably be busy for hours yet, and as much as she wished he'd find her, she wasn't certain he could. So she'd walked, until her ear and nose were numb, until she could almost breath past her jittery thoughts.

Now, she'd run into the General in charge of Echo Base. He stood with his head bowed, greying hair catching brightly on the artificial light, something about the quiet of his pose speaking of grief. His head lifted, before she could turn around, and sharp blue eyes studied her intently.

If the talk in the mess could be believed, this man had fought in the Clone Wars with distinction, before working to form the Alliance, his promotion to General new enough to shine. Jyn was surprised, by how kind his face appeared. Saw had never worn his battles so lightly on his face, and neither had her father. But their was a bitter grief in his eyes, and as he watched her, Jyn wondered if he wore his scars on the inside, instead.

“Jyn Erso,” Rieekan said.

Swallowing, Jyn nodded. “Sir.”

A hint of amusement, as he turned in the direction she'd been headed, before she'd come across him. “Walk with me.”

Startled, Jyn did as she'd been bid, attempting to match his ground eating stride. He was silent for a long moments, before ushering her into a small room she had never entered. The door shut behind her, and the silence was noticeable, even for Hoth.

“My apologies, that I have not had time to speak with you before now,” Rieekan said as he sat on the edge of the desk, offering her a seat with a tilt of his chin. Jyn shook her head, and kept on her feet.

“Do you usually speak to stowaways?”

“I think we can both acknowledge that you are a special case,” he said simply. “But you will hardly be the first, after this victory you have won us.”

Her fingers curled, but she did her best to keep her face neutral. “I wasn't the only one.”

The General nodded, eyes steady. “Yes.”

Her next breath burned in her lungs, but she relished the pain, needed it to ground her. “I'd like to stay.”

“I'd hoped you would,” he replied. “You and your men made it possible to strike a powerful blow against the Empire, one we desperately needed. The loss of Alderaan could have been the end of us.”

Jyn lowered her eyes, stomach tight and knotted. Her men. She'd accepted the guilt of it, the self flagellation that her dreams brought, and it left her nearly sick to take some sort of credit for it. But perhaps one day it would sit less harshly in her gut, until she could accept the quiet thanks given. It helped, that Skywalker had capitalized on what they'd given him, and perhaps left her ghosts less restless.

Maybe one day, she'd have the chance to thank him.

Still, she'd known destroying the Death Star would be a beginning, not an end. She'd seen it in Cassian’s face. A fight that had been brewing for years had just begun.

“The Empire will strike back and it will strike back hard. We can expect a great deal of fighting in the future. Echo Base is as of now, a secret. But all secrets are eventually uncovered, and the Empire now knows to look,” Rieekan said into the silence, voice weary for the first time.

Jyn had seen some suggestions of it already. Rushing intelligence officers, cutting through celebrations with grim mouths. The Outer Rims were going to become far more dangerous than they were even now. Resistant forces like Saw’s would either be crushed or would flock to the newly empowered Alliance. With one blow, the Rebellion had become real and the Emperor would respond in kind.

“Why tell me this?” She asked finally.

“I never knew Saw Guerrero personally, Sergeant Erso, but I knew his reputation. What he was capable of pulling out of people,” Rieekan watched her, eyes steady. “Others may doubt that, but I do not. I'm sorry to say that your actions have not warranted you as many friends as they should, but it has garnered respect.”

The use of Sergeant rattled her, although Jyn did her best to hide it. As if the rank and position had merely been waiting on her to step forward, and take it. Swallowing, she pushed that aside and considered the rest of his statement.

Jyn thought of General Draven.

Cassian’s superior was not the enemy, but she doubted they were on the same side. Not after Eadu. She would not find a friend with that General, and Jyn did not want one.

“We have three years worth of work here that I need done in two, and I find you digging tunnels a waste of talent,” Rieekan continued. “We are lacking in resources, Erso, and securing them must be done in utmost secret.”

For a moment, she thought of refusing. Of asking to be sent into the fight, to walk away from what was being built in secret. Chewing on her cheek, she forced herself to consider the veiled offer. She'd spent her life, running from place to place, hiding. She'd never been given the chance to decide if building was something that she wanted to do.

She thought of Cassian, his carefully straight posture and dark eyes. Bodhi, with his cautious bravery and insistence that not everyone wished to serve the Empire. Of her father and Saw, two cogs of something she was still trying to understand.

“I don't sit still well,” Jyn said, letting all the other bits of pieces of her concern wash through her tone. “I'm not sure I know how.”

A hint of a smile on the General's face. “We’re at war, Sergeant. I think you'll be surprised at how little time you'll have.”

#otp: welcome home #rebelcaptain #rebelcaptain fanfiction #au:fix-it

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imsfire2fanficwriter · 7 years

Text

Running

(NB chapter fic, non canon-compliant; a companion piece to “Escape”)

Chapter 1

He’s become strangely used, these last few days, to running. And to acting on impulse. These last extraordinary days of his life, which so easily could be his very last days, too.

Once you start acting on your first quick thought, time after time, like this, it has a certain momentum. The heart wants to do right, but also to live. So when the grenade lands in the hold, bouncing with its tin-metal sound, he doesn’t hesitate for a second. He’s on his feet and leaping over it, straight out the hatch into the crossfire, because he’s the last man aboard alive and he wants to stay that way, and there’s a slightly better chance outside than in. He runs hunched over, praying. A part of his mind laughs at what he’s doing – trying to avoid getting hit, really, Bodhi? In all this shit you’re still trying to duck, still praying, still running?

Behind him on the landing pad, Rogue One is blasted heavenwards. Wreckage and shrapnel rain down on Bodhi Rook as he runs. He’s going to be running in his last breaths, it would appear. He wants to live.

He breaks through the belt of trees onto the next pad in time to see Chirrut dead on the sand, and Baze, bleeding, fallen a few yards off, turning to look at his beloved. Another grenade explodes and the blast throws him bodily back into the undergrowth and snatches the howl of grief from his mouth. It snatches the very air. He knows they’re dead.

He gasps and chokes, struggling to his feet, ears ringing, blinded by smoke. Starts running again.

He’s limping harder now, the leg wound a tearing pain at every step. He can feel blood in his boot. He runs and ducks and yells his rage and pain and terror. Blaster bolts fly past him. Blood splashes in the sand, in the shallows. The salt water stings.

Another landing pad. A ship. A little, pretty thing, practically a yacht, some senior officer’s private jaunting car or Captain’s gig. Breath ripping in his throat, blood in his footprints and his heart, Bodhi flings himself aboard and into the pilot’s seat. No time to think, no time to panic about keying in the wrong codes or firing up engines and exhausts in the wrong order. He does think of it, his brain running at treble speed, even as he tells himself there’s no time, even as he hits keys, bang, bang, bang; hears the engine start to purr, an absurd sweet sound in the racket of battle. The vibration kicks in, soft as a kitten’s heartbeat, and he hauls on the launch lever. The yacht takes off into the firefight.

She handles like a dragonfly, the most exquisite piece of flight tech he’s ever touched. In any other situation it would be comedy, or heaven.

He flies through the storm, dodging blasts and phaser fire, the delicate little ship almost dancing through the air as he steers towards the transmission tower. He’s their only way out, he has to get there in time.

Beyond the stark line of the tower the whole sky is filled up. Scarif has a twin suddenly, a new full moon looming over her sunny seas. Bodhi gapes at it. There’s only one thing it can be.

It fires. Green lasers vivid as hate, ripping the world open. The ship is spun off course by shockwaves as the energy slices down. He wrestles it back under control, searching the ground frantically.

There. At the foot of the tower. Movement. So far off. Too far off; the worst of nightmares, to see them and be unable to reach them. He turns the yacht anyway, banking, flying straight towards the oncoming blast wave. He’d know those tiny figures anywhere, even stumbling and struggling as they are, even so far away. The boiling sea advances. He’s steering into his own death for them, and he sees Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor embrace, lost and alone on the beach, as the shockwave billows forward and cuts him off from them.

Bodhi’s scream hurts his own ears. But it’s too late. They’re out of sight, they were always too far away. The blast will reach them and he can only choose, but it’s no choice; fly into the flames and die with them or run and live.

He almost does fly into the destruction. Cassian, dead. All of them dead. What is there to live for now? But he wants to live. He’s still running, he still wants to live.

He pulls up and guns the engines, pushing for altitude, running for the sky. Compared to Scarif Base burning behind him, his friends and every last thing he loves burning, the blaze of clearing the stratosphere is nothing.

He dodges and ducks through the ongoing space battle, barely seeing the destruction, the wrecks, the swooping fighters and slow monstrous flagships. As soon as he’s in clear space he inputs calculations he’s done ten hundred times, and makes the jump to hyperspace, and home.

He wants to see the red beauty of Jedha one last time before he dies.

But the face of home is a beauty marred now by a scar half a continent wide. He orbits the planet and knows his home is no longer there. Every street he’d ever run along as a child, every wall he’d ever climbed, every rock he’d ever played on, gone. Everyone he knew, the last few of his family, the last of his friends, all gone. Old friends and new, old hopes and new, all dead.

He’s starting to cry at last as he calculates new coordinates. He sits staring down at the mutilated face of his loss, while the system calibrates and aligns. He can never go home.

He takes the yacht into another jump knowing he will not come back.

Once safe in the flickering blue nowhere-yonder of hyperspace he wraps his arms round himself and begins to sob, and then to howl out loud. Tears pour down his face. He can’t bear it, and he must bear it, and he cannot.

He hears Cassian Andor’s last words to him over and over: Keep the engine running, you’re our only way out of here. Over and over. Life will be agony, for the rest of the time it lasts. He failed them. He killed them. He killed them all, he killed the captain, he killed Cassian.

He’ll never see him again; those beautiful eyes, so kind, so guarded, so hopeful at the last, will never look at anything or anyone again.

Bodhi cries until he’s sick and light-headed, until he wants to throw up, until he is worn out. He falls asleep in the pilot seat, and wakes hungry and cold and drowning in despair. His leg has grown stiff, and every muscle aches; the wound opens again when he moves, and the pain brings on another wave of exhausted tears. But the yacht speeds on, and leaps into real-space again, over Yavin 4. He sits crying at the controls, his running done. He still wants to live.

Chapter 2

The Comm has been shouting at him for some time before he registers it, and realises the voice addressing him is taut as a garrotte with suppressed fear.

“Unknown vessel, identify yourself! We have weapons locked on to you. Identify yourself or we will fire!”

He scrabbles for the microphone, shouting “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot! Rogue One, call sign Rogue One!”

“The hells you are,” says the Comms operator angrily.

“No, please, you don’t understand, I am, I am! I’m the only one left, I’m the pilot. Bodhi Rook, I’m the pilot…”

“Rogue One was lost with all hands!”

“I know, I know, I saw them, I couldn’t reach them, I’m the pilot, please don’t shoot!”

For a moment there’s no answer, and he is starting to try and calculate coordinates to jump again, his brain chasing thoughts that skitter like raindrops on ice. Of course there can be no refuge for him here. He’ll just have to run and keep running, for the rest of his life.

“I know that voice,” a second operator interjects urgently. “That’s the pilot.”

“Yes!” Bodhi yells, all the half-grasped figures scattering from his mind again. “Yes, it’s me, it’s me!”

“Bring him in,” says the second voice. “Stand down defences.”

He makes himself breathe and breathe again, and say almost calmly “Thank you.” The little yacht sails down, still handling like a spirit even under his hands that shake now with stress and the end of stress. It lands as sweetly as a leaf on water.

Bodhi unfastens his seat belt, powers down the engines, remembers that’s the wrong order of doing things, remembers none of it matters anymore. He stands up and his leg stabs him. He looks out at the chaotic landing field, at flight crew and ground crew working and running, ships preparing for take-off, the line of big hangars ahead. His friends will never see these things again.

He climbs down from the entry hatch and feels the solid surface of Yavin 4 under his boots.

His friends will never come back here. Cassian Andor will never feel the kind ground underfoot again.

They are all gone into atoms, he thinks as he staggers across to the people running towards him. All gone back to dust, dust and the fire-breath of stars. Those wise, kind, watchful eyes, burned out now.

He faints on the concrete, just short of the outstretched hands of help.

He’s debriefed, at length, by men and women who do the job diligently and professionally, without emotion. They pass the roles of interrogator and sympathetic listener back and forth amongst themselves, never letting him relax and trust any of them. He knows it’s necessary, he is a traitor after all; but it’s a strain nonetheless, enduring the games they play, testing his veracity. Once, he snaps and shouts at them to bring their Bor Gullet and be done with it. Blank baffled stares greet his outburst, and he subsides. The creeping monster that sucked its way through his every thought, even that, now, is dust.

Once, he cries. But it’s too easy an excuse, to settle for misery and the label of having been broken by his experiences. He fights through the tears and refuses to run.

That’s when they tell him about Alderaan, and that the plans were recaptured. And for a time his resolve breaks indeed.

But in the end he wants to live, and to help others do so. It may be a tiny end-game, one man’s decision smaller than a single atom in a galaxy crashing to ruin, but he wants to go down holding true to the values and hopes his friends died for.

When the news arrives of the rescue, of Senator Leia Organa and the plans both saved and brought home, he stands at the back of the council chamber listening to the debate. Last time he was here, he stood just behind Jyn, right at the front, willing her arguments to be heard and understood, shaken to the heart when she was rejected. He sensed that he was barely seen, standing there at the centre of the debate. It seems far more natural to be where he is now, behind a wall of people twenty bodies deep. He’s in his proper place, unnoticed, an object of indifference to all.

As soon as the council disperses he hurries to offer any service he can, in the fight that’s to come.

He flies evacuation transports, for the base hospital and then for civilian personnel, nineteen solid hours of hyperspace jumps as they try to save as many people as possible from the approaching Death Star. By the time he lands back at Yavin Base for the fifth time and learns the news, he is dizzy with tiredness, and his newly healed leg is aching again; but he’s allowed no time to sleep, for the biggest party he’s ever seen is erupting. He finds he has no choice but to celebrate with strangers the victory he worked for with dead friends.

He feels strange, adrift, looking from outside himself with disbelief at the unimaginable luck they’ve had.

There’s a lot of drinking, but Bodhi doesn’t drink. A lot of shouting and singing and dancing round bonfires. He sings, picking up the words and the tunes by ear, and joins in the dances though he doesn’t know the steps. He sits beside one of the bonfires and watches an improvised firework display; gets kissed, and disciplines himself to kiss back sometimes.

But all the time, he can see in his mind the faces that won’t appear suddenly, waving in the crowd, and hear the voices that will never cheer alongside his.

Still, it is victory.

Chapter 3

The day after the battle of Endor, the day after victory, he presents himself at headquarters and tells a weary-eyed duty officer he wants to join up. He’s a pilot, and a good one; he can learn to fly anything, it’s the one thing strength he has confidence in. He wants to be useful and this is the only way he can think of.

A hung-over recruiting Sergeant takes his details, swears him in and instructs him where to go to get fitted for a flight suit. Then looks at her computer screen again and says

“There’s a tag on your name in the system. Mon Mothma wants to see you.”

“No, that can’t be right.” He doesn’t mean to say it aloud but it’s true, this surely must be a mistake.

“Right here, I promise you. You don’t want to keep the Commander-in-Chief waiting, do you, Private?”

Hearing himself called Private for the first time is odd, and then suddenly comforting; it’s a start, a first shadow of belonging again. He essays a salute and is sure he’s doing it wrong; tells himself to practice in front of a mirror. But the Sergeant grins, good-humoured, and sends him on his way.

The Commander-in-Chief is almost as relaxed, though she doesn’t have the bleary demeanour of most of the base this morning. She greats him kindly and offers him a seat. Her personal office is small and calm, bright with sunshine from a big window overlooking the forests and towers. The desk she sits down at bears a file of papers, a potted lily with starry white flowers, a carved chunk of ochre-red sandstone. The stone is beautiful, red as homecoming in the clear sunlight streaming through the window.

“I realised I had never thanked you,” Mon Mothma says. “I wished to rectify that.”

He blinks. “Oh. It doesn’t matter. Ma’am.”

“It was an unjust omission,” she says gravely. “The last few days have – been pretty eventful. But none of this would have happened, none of it could have happened, without your courage. Thank you, Private Rook.”

He wants to tell her he doesn’t deserve thanks, but hers is not a face used to rebuffs. The best he can think of is to say weakly “It was a – a group effort. Not just me. Not even mostly me.”

She nods. “Nonetheless. We cannot thank the rest of the crew of Rogue One, though we will celebrate their names. There’s due to be a ceremony, medals for the pilots who fired the kill-shots, a memorial to the dead. It’s not the sort of thing we’ve done in the past, but the mood is in favour of some kind of official recognition. I wanted to ask you if you would be willing to take part. Receive a citation on their behalf, perhaps?”

She is asking, when she could order him. He feels that intensely; this is the good side of the rebellion, the counterbalance to that chaotic council meeting when the lack of consensus destroyed any chance of a decision. The rebels don’t compel free people, and he is a free man, even now as a serving soldier.

He imagines how the team would have reacted to being honoured; the mixture of emotions, deep pride and deep discomfort, cynicism, awkwardness, serene gladness… In that company, surrounded and held in their equal confusion, he could have owned his own joy and proud embarrassment, could even have delighted in them. He could have hidden among his friends and looked into his confused heart, and found a balance there. But this? – standing up alone in front of dozens, maybe hundreds – for all he knows maybe thousands – to represent the dead and be honoured for them? – this is not the same at all.

He swallows and tries to lecture himself into acceptance. It’s recognition of their courage, not of his lack of it. Recognition for Cassian’s leadership, his years of dedication. Himself, just a vehicle. He tries; but it’s no good, and he says so. “I can’t. I’m sorry, I just can’t.”

“I understand.”

“I’m the one who left them there,” he adds. He, Bodhi Rook, the traitor, the coward, the untrustworthy, to be the face of the heroic dead? “No way does anyone want to honour me!”

“That isn’t true, I assure you.”

“You don’t understand”.

“I think I do, actually,” says Mon Mothma, cool as ever. “It’s natural to feel pain at being the only survivor. And I can’t blame you for being reluctant to take part. I shall have to attend, and I wish I did not. The rebellion has always regarded this kind of spectacle as something the Empire does, not us. I regret the fact that so many people feel a need now to change this.” She gives an almost imperceptible sigh. “I’ll request you be excused from attending. We could say combat stress, maybe?”

“Thank you.” He doesn’t care what reason she gives. He’s ashamed of what a relief it is, not to have to do this.

The Commander-in-Chief takes something out of the folder in front of her and offers it to him.

“I wanted secondly to ask your views on this. It’s only a mock-up as yet.”

He takes the sheet of paper, bewildered, and sees it’s a design for a poster. The Heroes of Rogue One, written across the top of an image of them all. His heart swims, turning like a seal in his breast. He hasn’t seen their faces for days, and there they all are suddenly. Baze looking grim, and Chirrut grimly cheerful. Tonc, who died in the hold of Rogue One beside him; Sergeant Melchi, and Sefla, and Basteren; Pao, showing his teeth. Men who’d never given up, and men who’d known the dark for far too long and then tasted hope again.

There was Jyn, all clear-eyed certainty, pugnacious and alive. The droid, somehow managing to look both confident and sour despite its expressionless face.

Himself. Looking surprisingly calm, considering how terrified he remembers being.

Cassian. Lean and determined, grim as the Guardians, resolute as Jyn. Eyes full of fire. So alive.

He realises he’s been gripping the sheet and staring at it for several minutes. Numbly he says “What is this?”

“Recruitment campaign,” says Mon Mothma quietly.

He tears his eyes away from the faces of the people he couldn’t save. No, no no no, please, no… “Please take me off it…”

Her mouth is an expressionless line. “I have been pushing for you to be kept in.”

“I’m sorry, I just can’t. I can’t! I’m not a hero. I left them there! Everyone knows it, people stare at me, everyone knows I’m the man who took them there and left them to die. You should use Cassian as your poster hero, he gave you his whole life, he deserves to be praised and immortalised like this. So do the others. Please, not me.”

He puts the sheet of paper back emphatically on the desk, pushing the dead man’s eyes away from him.

“Very well.”

Is he supposed to wait to be dismissed, or can he ask to leave? Is it acceptable for him to ask a question? He has no experience of interacting with anyone so senior; the Empire’s strict adherence to hierarchy saw to that. There is a silence.

She sits quietly, without impatience. He’s trying to steady his rapid, panicked breathing, and realises she may be waiting for him to get calm again. The idea she may see him as meriting her concern is both a jolt and a reassurance.

At length she says “So, have you given any thought to what deployment you’d like? I can’t promise anything, but if there’s a particular base you would like to be assigned to, say, it might be possible to arrange that much, as a token of thanks.”

“What deployment I’d like?” He gapes. “I don’t understand.” Surely if he’s a soldier now, he’ll be obeying orders, going where he’s sent. He’d hoped that that way he can be a nobody once more. “I – I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”

“You’re a pilot. Is there a particular squadron you had in mind? We’re re-naming one; would you be interested in serving in Rogue Squadron?”

His heart twists inside him again, and he says shakily “No, no thank you…” But there is one thing he has thought about, a good deal, this last week. “Ma’am, may I ask a question? Were there any survivors? From Alderaan?”

She presses her lips together for a moment, and her eyes lose their calm. In a low voice she says “From the planet itself, no. The destruction was – total. But” – she inhales and raises her head slightly – “from off-planet, yes, a great many. Everything from diplomats and trade attachés to merchantmen, to holidaymakers and even criminals in gaol. All of them refugees now.”

“What are we doing for them? We should do something – we must.”

Mon Mothma nods her head. “There’s a team assigned, to escort any vessels from Alderaan here, and collect individuals who lack transportation. It will be a huge undertaking, but we will bring them to Yavin 4 and give them the hope of a future. Now that there is hope to give. Is that the mission you would like to be assigned to?”

He can’t bring back his friends, or his family, or his home. But he can give his life to atone for failing them. He can run with the desperate, the betrayed, the homeless, and bring them home.

“Yes,” he says. “Please. Yes.”

Chapter 4

By the time the new settlements on Yavin 4 are well-established, and every citizen of lost Alderaan who wants to come there has been found and rehomed, Bodhi Rook is a Sergeant himself. He knows there’s no chance the promotions were another tacit reward for surviving Rogue One, because in the intervening months and years he’s logged more flying hours than any other pilot in any search-and-rescue team in the entire fleet. Two years without a single day’s leave of absence; he has just one thing to live for, and that’s his work.

He still dreams of Scarif.

The first year it was every night. He feared sleeping, but his exhaustion would always overtake him in the end, and then he’d be there on the sandy shore, walking slowly through the battle. Somehow in all the chaos of shooting and explosions nothing ever hit him in his dreams, though he’d see figures fall to left and right, shot, struck down by shrapnel, blasted apart by explosions. Everyone falls; people who were there, people who were not, people he didn’t even know back then, people he hasn’t seen since he was a boy. His family and childhood friends die all around him, and refugees by the hundred, and fellow-fliers, co-pilots, ground crew. He sees Galen Erso there, over and over again, and Mon Mothma and her generals, and the senators who stood round the council table that fateful day and refused to join the assault. All of them dying on the beach at Scarif Base, everyone he’s ever cared about or respected, or wanted to trust, or wished he could have saved.

Every time Chirrut and Baze are there with them; sometimes already fallen, sometimes still on their feet and fighting with a gracefulness and skill that leaves him wanting to cheer, until they are cut down and lie dead in one another’s arms, in their blood. The soldiers are there, battling on and falling one by one, or waiting helplessly with bound hands, trapped prisoners, until they are mown down by AT-AT fire. Even the droid is fighting in his dreams, yelling insults in its cool voice, both forelimbs modified into giant blasters; but K2 falls as well, and the spark goes out in the metal-rimmed eyes, night after night.

He sees Jyn and Cassian, every time, either right ahead of him or far off; always standing face to face, a foot apart. He tries to run to them but his legs are weighed down and he can barely keep moving. Blaster bolts and projectiles fly around the couple as though an invisible force is protecting them; he tries to shout to them to use it, to feel it and use it, the Force will protect them. In the hideous din of fighting they don’t hear. Always. Never. They move together and embrace tightly, a tiny moment of intimacy in the middle of the battlefield; and are gone, as the final blast obliterates everything.

The body grows accustomed to broken sleep, and Bodhi keeps going, even when he dreams the same dream three times a night. He jolts awake with a gasp and lies sweating, listening to his heart try to hammer its way out of his ribs. Hears it steady itself and grow calm again. Tosses and turns and at length goes back to sleep; and is back on the beach, screaming at Jyn and Cassian to save themselves as they die holding one another.

He tries to tell himself he doesn’t know why they are embracing in his dreams. Knows he does. They always embraced with their eyes. All the dream does is let them touch as they never could in life.

He talks to doctors, and is offered counselling, which means reliving that day even more frequently than he already does, and medication that deadens his sleep, but also replaces his appetite with constant nausea. He isn’t blessed with a physique that can bear throwing up after every meal for very long. He stops taking the pills. He talks to a red-robed cleric, who can at least remind him of the clear faith he had as a child, before the Empire came. She reassures him that he is doing the right thing, that his friends and family would be proud of him, that the Force was with them when they died. It’s a comfort; but comfort doesn’t stop the dreams. He learns to get on with life on five hours’ sleep instead of seven, most nights.

It takes a long time before he notices that sometimes there’s a night with only one bad dream, or none at all. The change is very gradual; slowly, over many months, the five hours of sleep increase to six. When the Alderaan refugee mission is finally wound down, and Bodhi Rook is reassigned to Hoth, he feels like a new man.

The nightmares do not stop, he is beginning to suspect they never will; but with this latest change they become, again, less frequent. On Hoth he’s too cold most of the time to be anything but exhausted, and he sleeps deeply most nights, for the first time in two years.

He does supply runs for a while, there, either bringing goods in to Hoth or running blockades to carry aid elsewhere. It’s a happy, busy few months. Until the Base falls.

In the chaos of the evacuation he is grabbed by an officer shouting for a pilot; he scrambles up the gantry-way he’s pushed towards, onto the flight deck of a GR-75. He’s confirmed to himself a long time ago that he really can fly pretty much anything, and he’s trained for the large transports, but he’s never yet taken one up for real. Now he finds himself at the controls of the largest ship he’s ever flown. Almost a thousand lives are depending on him. There’s cannon fire all around as they clear the atmosphere, and the heavens are full of Imperial ships, slow-circling monsters the shape of teeth. For the first time in over a year his hands and his voice shake for a moment, before he makes the jump to hyperspace.

It’s not a regular trip but an escape, running with no end point, the cold stability of Hoth vanishing behind and an empty future ahead. All the hope of two years, falling like a kicked snow-castle.

He wakes up three days later with a burning fever and is sent to the on-board med-bay. It’s his first illness since he defected.

“You have over-stretched yourself,” the medical droid tells him snippily. “Your body is too worn out to resist the virus. I am putting you under orders to rest.”

But a week later he’s back at work. Resting means having nothing to think about. Having nothing to think about means thinking about everything, and out of the blue after months of self-possession he finds that thinking about it means dreaming about it once more, fighting it again and yet again and again. He falls ill a second time and this time is confined to the ward until the medical staff confirm him fit for active duty.

At the end of the prescribed ten days, they refuse to do so.

He reads and watches holos and tries to keep awake. The med-droids give him sedatives and dream-reducers, and he throws up, and is kept under supervision for another three days. Then longer. His sick leave marked “extended” in the medical file.

He’s fought the dreams so many times now. He thought he’d beaten them. He knows he’s ill.

There is psychological help available but it’s prioritised for combat veterans, and Sergeant Rook has only ever flown search-and-rescue and humanitarian aid, and troop transportation, and emergency supply runs, and a few weeks here and there of blockade running; and before that seven years of cargo shipments for the Empire, living in constant fear and loathing himself for it, every day.

He doesn’t think he deserves to have counselling. He tells the doctors so, surly with misery, and it takes a crisply delivered bawling-out from a droid even ruder than the late K2 to get him to accept he must ask for help.

Strangely, the first breakthrough in his counselling comes less than a month in, when he breaks down and admits that he can only remember his friends’ faces now when he dreams of them. His waking memories have grown blurry; even looking at the old recruitment handbill he keeps hidden in his locker can only bring them back with the same expressions as they have in the picture.

He had probably the worst crush of his life on Cassian Andor and now he cannot remember the Captain’s face or his voice, except by allowing himself to sleep and dream of him dying. Is it not enough to feel so much shame at having survived, when others so much more worthy died? Must he himself consign those precious brilliant eyes to oblivion nightly, and forget them every day?

Slowly, gently, very kindly, the counsellor leads him through the minefield of pain, and helps him for the first time to plot out a pathway that doesn’t lead to despair. He knows the Captain was fierce and alive, brave and kind; knows he died for something he believed in. They all did; and they saved not only the rebellion and the dream, and billions of lives, but also him. He owes them everything he has, life, sanity, the chance to do something worthwhile with the remainder of his days. She lets him talk, and asks questions he’d never considered. He hears himself say one day “No, I don’t think Cassian would have wanted me to do this to myself, I think he’d have loathed it. He wanted the rebellion to win so that people could live better lives and be free and happy, not so they could hate themselves” and in a quiet, undramatic way that realisation feels like a new morning.

That night he sleeps without sedatives, and dreams only once; and it’s not of the battlefield but of a sunny room in Yavin Base, where he is giving a distracted recruiting officer his name and qualifications, and asking to join up. The officer writes the details down and asks him to sign; the pen turns into a flowering branch as he offers it to Bodhi, and he looks up and smiles. It’s Cassian. They shake hands and Bodhi wakes in disbelief, with his heart racing.

In the end, he’s off active duty for three months, but the counsellor recommends him for light duties, and he begins again.

He hasn’t seen the last of the nightmares, but once again, very, very slowly, there are fewer of them, and the harmless dreams become more frequent, the sort where regular illogical dream things happen, where pens turn into trees and his lost friends are willing to smile at him.

He vowed to himself two years ago that he would live the life his friends had not survived to see.

He renews that secret oath now, to himself and to the dead; and goes back to work, flying another aid delivery mission.

Chapter 5

At thirty he’s a Lieutenant. The Concordance has been implemented and slowly something like peace is being restored. He wonders if there will be less for him to do, less meaning for his life now, but if anything there is more, for the years of civil war have left billions homeless, and worlds too many to number are crying out for help to rebuild.

At forty, when the final remnants of the Empire’s work are believed cleared at last, he’s a Captain. He’s never flown a fighter in an engagement, but at every other kind of mission a being can serve in, Bodhi Rook has excelled. No-one in the entire Alliance has more experience of the management and delivery of emergency rescues, the logistics of aid missions and humanitarian assistance. People seek him out for his input. His advice has saved lives and mitigated disasters; his life has been a blessing for millions.

He’s long ago laid his ghosts to rest, with love and gratitude for all he learned from them.

At fifty he’s a Commodore, and beginning to consider retirement. He’s had something he never dreamed of when he was young, a career; and not just any career but one spent doing good work. He has learned to feel a kind of satisfaction, a self-acceptance, knowing it was only for that work that he’s received promotion. He’s lived the most spartan of existences and has enough credits saved to buy himself a pleasant small home on a comfortable world if he chooses. But he’s never really enjoyed his periods of shore leave and R&R, planet-side. A quarter-century of being constantly busy, constantly useful, has left him reluctant even to try doing nothing. He’s not at all sure he’ll get anything out of it, even if he’s lucky and it doesn’t bring back nightmares decades old.

He’s shying off from dealing with the question, and reports are starting to come in of the First Order’s expansionist policies. Raids on shipping, then full-blown attacks on independent or Republic-aligned worlds; always with an excuse, some tale of intelligence reports and suspicions of terrorist bases, of mysterious civil insurgencies and local powers requesting assistance. The Republic issues protests and expels diplomats, and tries to pretend this new danger will behave rationally if it’s treated rationally, that it will keep to its own side of the galaxy, that it will not break the Concordance.

He’s seen it all before. His heart twists inside him, and then steadies, and is firm. He won’t run, not from this resurgent evil; he knows exactly what the First Order are. The inheritors of hate, the heirs of the people who destroyed his home and killed everything he’d ever loved.

When General Organa begins formally trying to challenge the policy of polite protest, Bodhi is one of the first to support her. She argues and pisses powerful people off in council; he casts his vote for her plans. She gives up appealing to the Senate and begins sending her own break-away missions, gathering intelligence or looking for ways to support the non-aligned worlds under threat; she takes action and rallies resistance, and he’s with her. He still remembers a council meeting when no-one could agree to take a necessary risk, and a belligerent young woman who decided to take it anyway, on her own if need be. He remembers her force of will carrying enough people before her to win the day, in the end. Himself among them. He’s lived ever since on time borrowed by their courage.

He pledges his allegiance now to the General and her goals.

Dozens of officers, the experienced and tired who never want to see another Empire, and the young and eager who want to commit themselves to their ideals, follow Commodore Rook into the political wilderness, to join the Resistance.

His home is now once again a single room in officers’ quarters, on a hidden base. It feels like a homecoming. He stops worrying about retirement; there are far more serious things to be dealt with and his flying skills are back in demand as the Resistance tries to make the most of the often-outdated ships it can muster or steal. Bodhi is busier than ever, and happy, despite the quiet fear every rebel shares, that they will not be enough to hold off the coming war.

He receives a message one day from the General, asking him to join her at the base hospital.

General Organa hasn’t been well the last few months, ever since the news arrived of her husband’s murder. She drove herself relentlessly on in the aftermath of that blow, and along with the rest of the Resistance, Bodhi has watched with concern. Hearing she’s in the hospital now, he panics. Although it’s incomprehensible why she would send for him in such a situation, nonetheless he imagines her bedridden, helpless, perhaps dying. Yet another person he loves and respects and aspires to be like, brought low by this endless battle against oppression. He spurs himself into something approaching a run, and arrives for their meeting out of breath and tense.

She isn’t in bed. Isn’t even under medical supervision. In fact she’s sitting in a small room adjoining the Physiotherapy gym, and looking more cheerful than he’s seen her in weeks as she chats to two young men. He recognises the one standing up as Commander Dameron, one of their best and bravest pilots, one of the heroes of the recent fighting. The other is seated; a young man, slim, good-looking, and currently running in perspiration.

Dameron is smiling broadly; he stands to attention crisply and the General laughs as Bodhi tells him “At ease, Commander.” Everyone is beaming. He feels as though he’s just missed hearing a grand joke. He tries to catch his breath surreptitiously.

“I’m glad you were able to come so quickly,” General Organa says. “Finn, this is Commodore Rook; Bodhi, I’d like you to meet our newest recruit. This is Finn. I hope you’ll be able to help him adjust to his new life.”

By the looks of it, the younger man has just completed some kind of strenuous physio work-out. A stout brace is wrapped around his torso and he’s wearing grip-gloves on his hands. He’s wiping his face with a towel and he smiles past it from Bodhi to Dameron to the General and says a cautious “Hello.”

Dameron brings forward a wheelchair, and bends to help him up from the bench he’s sitting on.

Bodhi says “Good to meet you, soldier. I’m happy to help, Ma’am, although I’m not sure how much help I can be.” He has no experience of working with disabled veterans. What is he here for? And how can the young man be a veteran anyway, if he’s also a new recruit? It doesn’t make much sense.

And then the name clicks, and he says “Oh, wait, you’re the young man who? – you’re the Stormtrooper?”

Finn looks stricken for a moment before replying in a quiet voice “Yes, sir.”

Dameron lays a hand protectively on his shoulder.

It would have been good, Bodhi thinks, to have people stand beside him like that, all those years ago, to have had someone support him as he learned to live again. A counterbalance against the many who looked askance, who read in his face the guilt bleeding inside him, and wondered if he was trustworthy. This is the defector who helped them destroy Starkiller Base. The unlooked-for hero, the rebel of conscience; the real man who stepped out from the unassailable faceless ranks of white puppets. His eyes are so bright, bright as his heart must be; and, Force alive, he’s so young.

He knows how much courage it must have taken, for this boy to stand up and do the things he did. Knows intimately and deeply how hard that choice must have been, and how hard it will go on being. People will doubt Finn even though he’s committed his life to them; people will look at this eager, brave young face and see a traitor, and expect him to prove himself, no matter how many times he does so.

He knows without a second’s hesitation; he’ll do anything in his power to help. He reaches out, and now he’s beaming too. “May I shake your hand, young man? It’s a real honour to meet you.”

Finn shakes his hand, but his expression is uncertain.

The General says kindly “Finn has been worrying that he’ll never really be accepted here. I thought it would do him good to meet a fellow-defector.”

Finn gapes “You?”

Commander Dameron grins. He knows the story. Perhaps everyone does, Bodhi thinks, mildly surprised even now by the idea.

“Commodore Rook betrayed the Galactic Empire to come over to the Alliance,” says General Organa. “And as you can see, he’s made a solid career since then, and done a great deal of good. In fact I’d say he’s something of a hero around here. If anyone can advise you on learning to live with us, it’s him.” She stands up, and Bodhi and Dameron both straighten and salute. “I’m so glad you’re making such a good recovery, Finn. Boys, take care of him. I’m counting on you.” She smiles at them all and leaves, a small walking sun-core of dignity.

“So,” Bodhi says, taking her vacated seat. “What can I do to help you, young man?”

The ex-Stormtrooper sighs. “I don’t know… I don’t even know enough to know what I don’t know, if that makes sense.”

“Well, let me start by telling you that this won’t always be easy, but it will always be the best decision you’ve ever taken. And any time anything makes you wonder if you were mad to follow your conscience, don’t forget there will be people like me, like General Organa, like Commander Dameron here, who will stand beside you no matter what.” He wishes he could say more, but only one other thing occurs to him; words that call up a long-ago memory, words so potent to him that although they may sound odd now, he does add them after a moment. “Welcome home, Finn.”

Chapter 6

Bodhi mentors the boy Finn for several months. It’s clear from the start that there is something very special about this modest young man. He cannot remember when he last felt so intently that someone was a fulcrum, a being about whom others would gather and from whom they would draw courage. Probably not since he was no older than Finn himself; meeting Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor, all those years ago. It’s a joy to him now to see someone as brave and committed as them, not ignored and oppressed by orders but alive and thriving, applauded for his courage. But his recovery continues, and in time it takes Finn away. If it were not too melodramatic a way to look at the chaos of life, he’d say it was his destiny.

Bodhi tries not to worry about the lad. There’s already too much to worry about, if he allowed himself to. The First Order’s aggression continues unabated. He is just one soldier, but he must do his duty, just like Finn.

He refuses a desk job, for what feels like the thousandth time. Instead, he requests transfer onto the rescue mission for the millions of Hosnians made homeless by the single ghastly use of the Starkiller. The operation has been struggling on for months, and the monumental task of co-ordinating it properly is painfully familiar, but it restores him even as it also breaks his heart all over again. So many refugees, none of whom can ever return home, their whole system reduced to dust floating in space, a scar on the face of the galaxy.

And things are not going well. The Resistance has terrible set-backs, and for a time it seems as if they are doomed to fail in their fight. If this is how it’s going to finish, Bodhi decides, then he will at least fight through to the end. Too many good people have given themselves selflessly for this cause; he can never do less, without betraying their memory. Memories he still holds dear, even now. He will, they all will, endure, somehow.

He reminds himself of young Finn, bright-eyed fulcrum of hope, and of all the people who need someone like that to renew their convictions and inspire them to stand and hold their ground. The Finns and the Jyns, and the Cassians; the guiding lights who don’t go out, even at dead of night, even when everything dies. He can’t be one of them, is sure he never was and never will be such an inspiration; but he can still stand and do his best.

He carries in the breast pocket of his jacket a copy of an old recruitment handbill. The original is now too dog-eared and fragile to touch, but he had it framed years ago; it hangs on the wall of his room on base, next to an ancient watercolour of Jedha City. He looks at the copy sometimes, at the faces that are now vivid only in this one picture.

He wonders sometimes whether there is any hope. Reminds himself there always is. Reminds himself of the day he was told that you take each chance, until either you win, or the chances run out; and that that in the end is all there is to it.

At possibly the lowest point in the whole campaign, he accepts an assignment to a training camp, passing on his expertise to a group of recruits who will be running blockades throughout the Torranix sector. Most of them are more than capable pilots but have never studied logistics in their lives. He wishes there was time to give them more than just a short course, time to take them on training runs and real-life simulations. But these days, the Resistance has to take learning speed over learning depth. Time is more precious than the finest ores and gems. Bodhi works to bring the youngsters on as fast as possible; sends them to replace people lost in battle or taken captive. Begins work with the next contingent as soon as they arrive.

The tide of the times is against them right now; maybe always will be. It doesn’t entirely surprise him when Worru’du Base comes under attack.

He’s felt for a long time that his luck would run out, one of these days. Perhaps he is too old for the fight. Perhaps he should have taken one of those admin postings, or sneaked away and tried to enjoy a few years of retirement, let others do the hard work and bear the wounds, now.

He finds himself instead hiding out, underground, in a bunker three miles from the main base. He’s sent the recruits on ahead, getting them off-world in the only spaceworthy craft they could snatch; their lives, their training, their youthful strength and energy, are more use to the Resistance than his. A handful of civilians and ground staff escaped with him and through a spy-eye they watch as First Order troops burn their headquarters to the ground and torch the remaining ships.

They have food for four or five days, perhaps more with careful rationing, but water for three at most. If help can reach them at all, it will take at least a standard day to get there from the nearest Resistance-held system. He’s the most senior officer there, and on the evening of the second day he decides to take the gamble of calling for an extraction. Then issues suicide pills, in case the message is intercepted.

When help arrives, it’s in the middle of the night and it isn’t an official extraction at all but a damaged freighter. A voice crackling on the Comm unit saying “Is anyone there?” and a ship looming in the shoulder-high grass, a tall dark-skinned woman with braided hair running towards him as he peers out of the access tunnel. She greets him gladly. “I caught your distress call when I put the channel on to make my own. I can trade you space for help; I need a co-pilot, mine got shot on Galand by a First Order patrol. How many are you?”

“Sixteen. Two with minor injuries.”

She looks over his shoulder at the figures gathering behind him; points back at her ship. “Can any of you fly one of these things?” The ship looks Bothan, and it’s a good size, a boxy dark bulk against the moonlight and the star-field.

“You’re Resistance?” he counters. If she isn’t, he’s a dead man anyway. But this is such a crazy way to begin an entrapment that he’s pretty sure she’s genuine.

“Hells, yes! What do I look like?” She grins as more bleary faces appear round him in the tunnel mouth. “Hi, folks, I guess I’m your ride out of here. Is there anyone here who can help me fly my ship?”

She gestures again towards the craft behind her.

“I’m a pilot,” he says. If they’re going to get shot down running, it will be good to be at the controls of a star-ship again at the end. “I think everyone else is ground crew or civilians, though.”

“One pilot is all I need. Okay, people, get aboard. I’m Lieutenant Shammen, by the way, Deyaa Shammen.”

It’s a Jedhan name, and he grins in the near dark as he answers “I’m Bodhi.”

The other base staff are hurrying past him, into the open hold of the ship; light pours down from the entry port and catches on the pips on his uniform.

She curses. “You’re a Commodore? Damn and blast, if they know there were senior personnel here they’re probably monitoring traffic all over the sector by now.”

“Can you just get us off-planet? We’ll decide what to do about me later? I’m responsible for these people, I need to know they’re on their way to safety.”

Deyaa Shammen nods. “Yes, sir.” She leads the way onto the freighter. “Let’s get moving, people.”

Once into the relative safety of the hyperspace lane she turns to him. “I can only think of one thing I can do with you and your people. Luckily it’s easy to get to from here. It’ll mean you’re all out of active service for a while, but it’s your best bet to lie low unnoticed.”

“You know a safe house?”

“Yep. I know the people who run it. It’s the start of a whole network, an Underground Railroad; runs right through the Ag Circuit. My Mom helped run the routes into it for years, I’ve been going there since I was a kid. You may have to be separated, but it’s the best way I can think of to get you all out of a mess like this. And the people who do this run always use old tin cans like this rig; so nobody’ll think twice about me ferrying a whole bunch of you.”

“Fine,” Bodhi says. “And thank you.”

He’s tired, after two nights without sleep, watching over the fifteen souls hidden with him beneath the grasslands. A safe house sounds painfully appealing suddenly.

He sets the co-ordinates Lt Shammen gives him; his new destination, for who-knows how long. Salliche.

Chapter 7

He sits in the co-pilot’s seat, watching the hectic blue swirling past the main viewport. It’s hypnotic. They’re on course and holding steady and there’s relatively little for him to do, and he catches himself yawning. Shakes his head and says “I ought to warn you.”

“Yes, sir?” says Deyaa Shammen, after a time. After another pause she prompts him “You’ve never flown a Bothan freighter before?”

“What? Oh, no, it’s not that. I’ve had no sleep for the last couple of days. My reaction times may not be at their best.”

“But you can fly this thing, right? Sir?”

“I can fly anything,” Bodhi tells her ruefully. “I am a pilot. But please keep me talking, so I don’t nod off.” He looks away from the blue of hyperspace smearing across the windscreen, focuses on the controls in front of him again. “I probably could fly in my sleep, but I’d rather not try the experiment just now.”

“What should I talk to you about, sir?”

“Anything you like. And please, don’t feel you have to keep calling me ‘sir’. I’m in charge of the people in back, but this is still your ship, Lieutenant… Tell me about where we’re going. It sounds as though you’ve done this trip before.”

“Oh hells, yes. My Mom used to courier people here during the Civil War and when things started getting hot again a few years ago I picked up her old run since I already knew the ropes and the routes, and the people.”

“They can’t be expecting us; is that going to make any problems?”

“I’m sure they’ll be cool with it. I’ve done this run three, four times a year since I started, Galand to the Ag Sector and back, and half the time I don’t know what I’m picking up till I get to the drop-off. Some trips, it’s a pile of shipping containers or something, and sometimes it’s people looking for a hide-out and I’m the one who got the job because I can get them to Solondori. The Hallik’s have been running this network for a good thirty years, they’re used to unexpected arrivals. It’s just a railroad run like a hundred others to them.”

“Any passwords or anything I should know?”

“Not for a formal delivery like this. It’s probably different if you arrive freelance. Back in Mom’s day it used to be that you had to say you wanted to be a fruit picker.”

“You want to be a fruit picker?” It’s certainly not what he expected.

“Yep. There’s a long tradition of itinerant labour in this system. That’s why it’s so easy to cover up bringing people in. You’re all supposed to be farm labourers looking for work.”

Bodhi realises something; turns in his seat and calls down into the hold “Everybody, you’re going to need to take off uniform jackets, anything with insignia, anything that makes you look like Resistance. We need to look like farm workers if we get inspected.”

“There’s a false floor in the starboard compartment, you can hide stuff there,” the Lieutenant adds over her shoulder. “Once we’re through customs we can get gear for you.”

Weary groans from the people in back; but he sees jackets being stripped off, shirts turned inside- out so the stripes are hidden. Hopefully it will be enough; Deyaa Shammen seems to think so, anyway, she nods and turns back to the controls.

“You’re very certain of these people,” he says.

“I’ve known the whole family since I was six months old. Solondori’s been the major entry point for the network for forty years and it’s never been hacked. The Halliks know what they’re doing.”

“Okay, that’s good to know…” He yawns again. “Damn. Tell me about – tell me about your ship. I noticed your operating systems are pretty high-spec; did you ask for the additions or did it come like that?”

“I built that myself. I like customising things, getting them to their highest capability. My Pa’s an engineer so maybe it runs in the family. My Mom once cannibalised an Imperial TIE fighter to build an escape ship, so there’s that to live up to, too. I’ve just been tinkering with ships all my life.”

“Your family name’s Jedhan, isn’t it?”

“Yep. I’ve never been there, though. Pa won’t go back, says he can’t bear to.”

“I know the feeling. I was born in the Holy City.”

“You know what he’s talking about, then. Those evil bastards.”

He grins at the casual frankness, and at the way she’s accepted him asking her not to call him “Sir”. Lt Shammen has a mixture of calm good sense and belligerent assertiveness that delights him. She reminds him of everything he’s admired, over the years, about the rebels. That whole “never give up” view of the world. It took him so long to learn to think like that, after a childhood living under those whose message was “never believe you can change this”; and to her it comes naturally.

So long as there are people like this fighting, surely there’s still hope. Like knowing young Finn; it’s heartening to see there is always another generation who won’t accept being trodden down and held in slavery. There have always been so many things wrong with the way they fought, the way they dithered, the way the cynics argued for the crudest possible direct action and the politicians for no action at all, or only for actions that would get them re-elected next year. But there have always been the quiet people, and the cheerful loud ones, who do their jobs and hold their ideals close, and do not give up.

In the end, he does doze a little, sitting upright in the co-pilot seat. Just for an hour or so. No dreams. He wakes and feels everything still solid, the Bothan ship still flying, the Resistance still fighting on, Lt Shammen still at the controls.

“Thank you for letting me catch a nap,” he says, and she grins sidelong at him and tells him he needed it, and besides, this is an uneventful as any flight she’s had in months.

Suddenly they are coming out of hyperspace and sweeping into a planetary system, approaching the misty blue ball of Salliche. He looks down at wide green continents, skeins of shining rainclouds, the miniature drama of a giant lightning storm over the southern ocean. The Comm unit comes on with a buzz, and Deyaa Shammen answers it and gives a string of authorisation codes to the bored-sounding Imperial Landing Controller speaking from planet-side. And then they are swinging down through the upper atmosphere and the cloud banks below, and coming in along the flank of a long range of low, rounded hills, in steady light rain.

“I already pinged my friends,” Deyaa Shammen says cheerfully. “They’ll be there to meet us.”

As far as he can see, the landscape is farmland, and green; stock animals grazing on hillsides and meadows, fields of ploughed red earth blushed with the first growth of crops, orchards full of spring blossom and new foliage, the delicate colours blending in the muted cloudy light, soft and fresh, acre after acre.

It’s all so peaceful; unnervingly so. It’s beginning to scare him, how easy this has all been. Can escape really be this simple?

The soil colour haunts him, that faint sheen of green over that terracotta-red. It looks like Jedha after the winter rains. The standing fields, the groves and orchards below the ship, all those are far too green; but that red plough-soil is precious and beautiful, a ghost in his eyes, a tiny momentary echo of things he lost more than thirty years ago.

Even if this is the day when finally everything goes wrong, he can remember home now and feel satisfied. He’s done his duty and held his truth, for decades; he’s avenged the destruction of Jedha, the dead of Alderaan, the lost souls of Scarif, as best he could. He’s lived the life that Cassian Andor laid down his life to build. He won’t die ashamed.

They land at a small spaceport on water meadows in a river delta; just three landing pads, and farmland all around, right up to the perimeter fences. There’s a big open-backed skimmer truck just arriving at the main entrance, and the driver looks across at the freighter coming in, and waves. Bodhi sees a young man, slim, dark-haired and bearded. Deyaa waves back from the viewport.

A guard in a creased uniform waves the truck in, hops onto the back to ride over to them. Deyaa says “Better check your people are ready.”

For a moment he feels again that twinge of alarm. Everything is going so smoothly. It can’t be this easy. Is this the day his long, long run of luck is finally going to run dry? He scrambles through into the hold, pulling off his jacket with the shining pips on arm and shoulder as he goes; rolls it and carries it under his arm. His mouth is dry as the gangway opens. But the inspection is ludicrously casual; just that one trooper, glancing inside and taking a head-count, Deyaa handing over scan-docs that are barely scrolled through. Either this is rigged, or someone somewhere has been paid a lot of bribes; or there actually are places where the First Order’s ruthless efficiency has not yet taken root. Maybe this really is the perfect place to run a safe house.

The young man from the truck is waiting, parked right outside. At close quarters he’s scruffy and handsome; mid-thirties at a guess, untidy collar-length hair, clear brown eyes and a smile that goes out to one side first and then the other. He’s grinning at Deyaa Shammen, and she marches down the ramp to greet him.

It’s all too easy, too easy. He hates this nagging, oppressive feeling of premonition but he can’t shake it. This is all going to go wrong.

They climb into the back of the vehicle. The young man introduces himself as Esperanz Hallik, shakes hands, scrambles back into the driver’s seat, Deyaa climbing up alongside him to chat. They drive for half an hour, through paddocks and groves and along the river bank on a way-marked route above a levee. The air is fresh and smells of recent rain, and insects sing in the orchards. At last the truck turns into a gateway, and bounces down a farm track between ranks of trees, towards a group of farm buildings.

The farm is all whitewashed timber and red tiles; twin frame barns piled high with bales of fodder, low workshops and outbuildings around a big old house with a stone-framed door and lines of gleaming windows. Fowl scratch in a vegetable garden in front of the house, and across a broad muddy yard; stout post-fences pen back a pair of healthy-looking banthas. There’s another skimmer truck parked beside one of the barns, stacked with crates, and as the last of the party climb down stiffly from their ride two people emerge from one of the buildings. They hurry over; a man a little younger than Esperanz, equally dark-haired and good-looking, and a younger female with olive skin and cropped blue-black hair. They both hug Deyaa Shammen for a moment before surveying the strays she’s brought with her.

“Volunteers?” asks the woman.

“Yep. Sorry about the unexpected delivery. Now of all times, too; Esper just gave me the news. Galen, Em, I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks…” says the second young man quietly.

“I can move them further on, if you’d prefer, see if one of the other houses can take them in?”

“No, it’s okay, stay, please. We’ve been trying to carry on, it’ll do us good to have some new arrivals to think about.”

“I’ll get Ma,” says Esperanz. “She’ll want to meet you all. Can you get everyone inside?” He lopes off towards the farmhouse without waiting for an answer.

“I’m Emren Hallik,” the young woman says to the whole group. “This is my husband Galen. Right, let’s get you all indoors and then we’ll sort out who needs what. I can already see someone’s limping; Gale, do you know where Hosk is?”

Bodhi stares after the second young man as he nods and heads off. Galen. However many years is it since he heard that name? It’s never been fashionable, but he knows that if he’d ever had a son, he might have called him that. How curious to meet a Galen now...

Emren Hallik leads them past the animal pen into a large cruck barn, Deyaa strolling beside her talking in a low voice. Since he can’t see what else to do, he follows with the rest of the group. He wonders what the bad news was. His tiredness is starting to catch up with him again, and knowing that makes him still more ill-at-ease. If anything goes wrong now, he’s going to need to be quick and decisive, and he feels neither of those things. He’s still responsible for fifteen other lives. His own, in the end, doesn’t matter; but he’s seen missions go wrong, teams not come back, too many times before. He’s responsible for getting these people safe home. He’s no longer sure he’s up to it.

He sits down slowly, on a straw bale at the back of the barn.

Maybe he is too old for this game. He’s only sixty-one, but he’s been working pretty much without ceasing, all his life. Maybe that desk job would have been a wise move.

The barn smells of stored grain and fresh-ground flour, wholesome and dusty, with undernotes of sweaty animals and something fruity and fermented. All around him now people are slumping onto the planked floor or sitting on crates and hay-bales. Everyone looks as weary as he is. Slanting afternoon light works through the planked walls and paints their faces in stripes of gold and shadow.

Dry fodder stalks prickle him through the seat of his pants, the wheaten smell is making him want to sneeze. Warmth seeps into him, a soothing touch along each bar of sunlight. He shakes himself; he can’t afford to fall asleep, not now.

Emren Hallik is talking, describing fresh clothes, sleeping arrangements, a mess hall behind the farm, a local medic who’ll see the injured personnel sorted out. Behind her a door slides open, the full height of the building, and the pattern of light and shade moves, flickering across the rows of weary listeners. Two figures, silhouetted; one of the men and someone much shorter, a woman carrying a data pad. They begin to move through the group, and he hears voices speaking one by one, names being taken and logged. His hands tighten into fists and he digs his nails in.

The figures are in front of him. He’s going to be one of the last to give his name. He looks at the woman with the pad as she approaches. She’s quite old; white-haired, with a round, kindly face and a mouth that has smiled a lot in the past but is expressionless now. Blue-green eyes, almost as tired and sad as his own. Eyes that widen, slowly, unnervingly, as they look at him; in shock and disbelief, and something more; alarm, perhaps, or horror.

So, this is it, this is the instant when things go wrong. This is what that subtle tug of premonition has been whispering about to him, this moment, this being seen by someone who sees what he is. Someone he feels horribly, totally, known by and seen-through by. He doesn’t know what in all the hells is going on, but certainly something is, because that is not the way an agent logging arrivals at a safe house looks at an old man like him.

Bodhi Rook stands up calmly, because damn it, he’s been holding his ground for thirty-six years, he isn’t going to start running again now. He’s the senior officer present; he’s responsible, he brought his people into this situation and whatever it is, he’s going to face it on his feet. He straightens up and puts his shoulders back, and gives his name, and rank, and serial number.

The woman stands staring at him.

After a long moment she puts out her right hand and touches the sleeve of his shirt, and his arm inside it. He tenses. Her mouth opens but no words come out.

“Ma?” says Esperanz Hallik. “Are you okay?”

She has to pull herself together visibly; she pushes the data pad at the young man saying “Take the rest of the names, please, I – I can’t”- and turns back to Bodhi. Still staring, still wide-eyed. “Is it really you?” Her sad, tired face has fallen open, like a broken thing.

“Do I know you?” he asks helplessly.

“Ah,” she says. “Oh, I don’t know how to say this. Yes, yes, you did, once. You don’t remember me. Bodhi, it’s me; it’s Jyn.”

It is Jyn. The reason he is known by those sea-coloured eyes is because they are the eyes of a dead woman, a woman who knew him once and trusted him, and was betrayed. Jyn Erso.

Bodhi’s knees give way and he sits down hard on the straw bale. “Uh…” His lips have gone numb, he can’t remember even the simplest words. She’s still touching his arm and he stares at her hand, incredulous. It’s a thin strong hand, the fair skin heavily tanned and scattered with small scars. There are crescent-corners of dirt under some of the nails. She must be, what, fifty-six, fifty-seven? The white hair had deceived him into thinking her much older.

“It is you,” she says. Her voice is small, as though she hasn’t enough breath to speak up. He raises his head and looks at her.

“It’s you,” he echoes. It’s her. “Jyn! How? How did? -”

She suddenly starts and looks around; at her son, staring, at the other faces clustering around, some listening openly while others politely pretend to be oblivious. Her expression twists painfully and he feels her tremble as her grip tightens. “I can’t do this here,” she says, and steps away from him.

He breathes deep and pushes himself to stand up, shrugging his jacket on again; follows her out of the barn and away from the astonishment there. His own shock walking beside him , tearing the oxygen from his brain. He goes across the farmyard unsteadily in the late afternoon sunlight, and Jyn, white-haired frail Jyn, leads him into her home and down a stone-flagged passage, to a large room at the rear of the house. There’s a giant double stove and bake oven, a long table set with benches; huge dura-steel pans hang from nails in the walls. A wooden dresser holds enough crockery for several dozen people, and on the topmost shelf is a set of old-fashioned holo-frames, running on low power; little groups of silvery ghost figures, standing looking about them blithely.

Jyn turns in the middle of the kitchen and faces him. Her posture is almost confrontational, and now he knows it’s her she’s unmistakable. Jyn, who escaped. Somehow. Jyn, who has a son; no, two sons. Esperanz and Galen. Jyn, who lived and paired up with someone and had a family, and runs a safe-house network in the Ag Sector.

He didn’t kill them all.

She says “We thought you were dead. We saw the ship blow, it went up like a firework. I’ve never forgotten it, seeing that, knowing we were all doomed. If we’d had any idea you were still alive…”

We. She keeps saying we.

He manages to reply. “I thought YOU were dead.” Horrible, hopeless, obvious words. Words that do not excuse him, because now nothing can. He didn’t kill them all; but he still left them. “I thought you -”

Jyn interrupts, shaking her head. “No, no, we made it. Deyaa’s mother picked us up. Ell. I’m so glad you didn’t die, that you’re alive! But if we’d known you were alive we would have…” She breaks off with a gasp.

He’s seeing it all again, the advancing cloud of fire and steam, the vaporised stuff of the planet itself rolling in to block his flight path and cut him off from them. Jyn and Cassian, holding one another in their last embrace. He imagines she’s reliving her own memories of those same few seconds, and shivers. But she lived. And - we. She said we, and again we, she keeps saying we.

“I had nightmares about it for years,” he tells her.

“Yes. Yes, we both did, too.”

Jyn is beginning to cry, and he wishes he could, too. His mind is ringing like a hollow sphere, like something struck and left echoing, a cave nightmarish with darkness and the ghost-voices of bats. He remembers the two slim, handsome men outside. Dark hair and beards, brown eyes, keen smiling faces. Long slightly hooked noses, narrow jaws, high cheekbones. Esperanz. Galen. Her sons.

He knows he ought to be telling her everything, he ought to be asking how she survived, how they came to be here, how did all that happen, that and apologising, explaining, begging her forgiveness. But the only words that come out are “You keep saying we. We. Jyn, who else made it out with you? Was it – was it Cassian?”

It has to have been Cassian. Surely those two bright-eyed young men are Cassian’s blood.

She said we, she said we…

Jyn puts her hands over her face, and standing in the middle of her sunlit kitchen surrounded by all the clutter of a good and busy life she cries as though her heart is breaking.

He’s steeling himself for the words she will say next, because this can only mean one thing. It wasn’t Cassian. She lived, she got over it, she met someone else and had a life. That’s what she means by this “we”. It was only her who survived; “we” is whoever she paired-up with, after.

Bodhi breathes and breathes deeper, and waits while she cries.

Even those few moments of thinking Cassian Andor might have lived have hurt him with a feeling like a hard cold punch, a blow somewhere deep in his gut. He swallows and stands his ground, to hear the inevitable. He’s an old man, and this shouldn’t matter as much as it does; but it does. He failed someone he loved, once, over thirty years ago, failed him and left him to die, and his whole life from that day to this has been built on atonement for that death. Why would that change now?

He makes himself walk over to Jyn, makes himself put his hands on her forearms gently. He’s shaking almost as much as she is. She raises her face to him; she’s shorter than he remembers, but her expression still has that clear-eyed certainty, and her voice even choked with tears is strong.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “He died last month.”

There’s a strange sense of delay before the gut-punch of shock comes again. It WAS Cassian, he did survive, he lived and loved her and had a family with her; and now he’s dead.

Last month. Only last month.

“Now of all times,” Deyaa Shammen had said apologetically when they arrived here. “I’m so sorry,” she’d said. This is why. This family, taking him and his people in, saving all their lives, they’re in mourning. They’ve lost a husband, a father, a father-in-law. They’ve lost Cassian.

All this time, he was alive; but it’s too late to do anything except slowly let himself hug Jyn, and bow his head as she puts her arms round him in response; and, finally, begin to cry.

Later - a good while later, maybe as much as hours, he can’t be sure – she has got him to sit down at the table and has put tea in front of him, and bread and blue cheese and a jar of sour pickles. Two cups, two plates, two sets of cutlery. She’s made him eat, and taken a few bites herself to keep him company. It’s odd, and charming, to know that short-tempered Jyn grew up to become a woman who shows care by feeding people. The bread is fresh and the tea is hot, and very welcome. The sun is low now, oblique light filling the kitchen and gleaming on the crockery and the hanging pans. He asks “What happened?”

“To Cass?”

“Yes.”

“It was his heart.” She runs a hand over her hair, fiddling with the bun at the nape of her neck. “It was very sudden. He was out in the upper pasture, taking fodder up for the banthas. It was a beautiful spring day, he’d been talking just that morning about what a wonderful day it was. When we found him he’d fallen in the long grass. He was looking up at the sky. The medic said it would have been instantaneous, that he wouldn’t have suffered at all. He looked more surprised than anything else.” She looked at Bodhi with a faint smile. “This is the first time I’ve talked to anyone about it. It feels strange to put it into words. I’ve always known one of us would die, either I’d leave him or he’d leave me. We were due to go together, on Scarif, but things didn’t work out that way. We’ve had thirty-six years of borrowed time. And now I can’t get used to him not being around.”

It feels crass to ask, intrusive to the point of cruelty; but he can’t bear not knowing. “Were you happy? Did he – did he have a good life?”

“We were very happy…” Jyn’s voice shakes, but she’s smiling again. “Truly, we were. He’d had – we’d both had – lives that weren’t really more than just surviving; and then this. Neither of us had ever expected to be so happy. Oh Bodhi, yes, Cassian had a good life. He did things he believed in. He saved so many lives. He was a brave man who lived his truth, and he was a good husband and a wonderful father. He had a happy life and I was happy, and so blessed, to be with him.”

She pushes back her chair a little unsteadily and goes to the dresser; takes down one of the larger holo-frames from the top. “Here – this is Galen and Em’s wedding, three years ago.” She brightens the image intensity, and sets it down on the table-top in front of him. “The whole family.”

A shining group of figures caught endlessly hugging and smiling, turning to one another and back in a feedback loop of happiness. Galen and Emren are in the middle, Esperanz and another woman, and another younger man, to their left, throwing grain and petals over them; Jyn and Cassian to their right. Through the faintly silvered cast the holo lends to other colours, he can see that Cassian’s hair and beard are grey. He is smiling, lines creasing the corners of his dark eyes; he has one arm round Jyn’s waist and with the other hand, over and over, he reaches into his pants pocket to produce another handful of flower petals and throw them at his son and new daughter-in-law. The sound is turned off but Bodhi can imagine the laughter and the jokes.

“Who are the others?” He points to the two figures he can’t put names to.

“That’s Esper’s girlfriend. Douny. She’s lovely. She’s a midwife, she works at the Solondori med-centre. She’s the one who put us in touch with Dr Hosk. And the other man – that’s our youngest. Bodhi.”

“Yes?” He looks across at her, puzzled.

She shakes her head for a second. “His name is Bodhi. Bodhi Hallik, officially; we’re all officially Halliks. Cass was Willix Hallik from the day we arrived her, I was – I am - Lianna. The boys know their real family name is Andor but none of us ever use it. False names are very odd at first and then you just forget about them, they’re part of your life, like having boots on your feet and gun at your side, and a baby in your arms.”

“You called your son – after me?” It’s a pebble in his throat. Bodhi Hallik; Bodhi Andor. Esperanz, Galen, and Bodhi. “I – I don’t deserve it.”

Jyn shakes her head again, firmly this time. “Don’t say that. Cass always said you were the bravest man he’d ever met. We always knew if the third child was a boy he’d be a Bodhi.”

He picks up his mug and takes a long gulp of the cooling tea, trying to mask the fact he has no words to speak.

“Esperanz,” Jyn says “Is ‘hope’ in Cassian’s native language. He would have been Esperanza if he’d been a girl. And Galen is for my father, obviously.”

“I always used to think if I’d had a son I’d name him Galen.” It seems safer to go sideways in the conversation than to stay here, looking at this astonishing idea of Jyn and Cassian’s child named after him; to think of them honouring him, never forgetting him. He picks at the crumbs on his plate. Cassian remembered him.

“You have kids?” Jyn’s voice is warm, and he wonders if she’s imagining his life as like hers. A farmhouse, tall sons, maybe grandchildren to come; building something, saving something, happy to remember the love you’ve lost, even through tears.

He sighs and says “No.” Hesitates, looking at her. There are things he can say, and things, he suddenly feels, that he cannot. He trusts Jyn, and maybe one day he’ll admit the whole truth, but it would be unfair to do it now, when her bereavement is so new. “I would have adopted, but – my work – it would have meant being an absent father so much of the time and, and, I didn’t want to put a kid through that if there wasn’t another parent at home with them, and I – I never met the right guy.” He looks away from the sadness in her face. This was meant to be the less-painful version of the story, not the version that would make Jyn cry again. He’s shaking slightly inside. But it’s probably shock. “It’s okay,” he says “I would have been a lousy husband and father.”

“I doubt that very much.” Jyn reaches out and lays a hand over his. “Why are you being so hard on yourself?”

“All I’ve ever done,” Bodhi says “Is run away.”

She raises an eyebrow, and for a second she is the caustic quick-tempered woman he remembers. “Running away? Is that why I see all those pips on your sleeve, Commodore? Seems to me you’ve got a strange way of running. Bodhi, you must’ve atoned for your time with the Empire a long time ago. I cannot believe you have anything to be ashamed of. How did you earn that rank if all you’ve been doing is running?”

“Well…” He looks into her eyes. Pugnacious still under all the motherliness, tough as a thief, all clear certainty and bravado and solid core. He always liked Jyn; he really couldn’t blame Cassian for having loved her. No more than he could blame her, for having given her love in return, to the man whose memory he’s tried to live up to all his days. “It’ll take a while. I’ll tell you my story if you tell me yours.”

“We’ve got all night. Tell me about your life, Bodhi. Tell me what you’ve done with yourself, all these years.”

He tells her his story, sitting at the kitchen table with the hologram smiling up at him. Finding, carefully, the words to explain his life, to her and to himself; all the decisions, all the choices and fears, the will to live, the same of death, the memories that guided him and had to be repaid. Finding, slowly, that perhaps, in the end, he has been strong enough, and he has done enough. Finding that in the end he is telling one life, well-lived and full, to another.

Finding himself beginning to smile back, at the kind remembered face in the holo.

Perhaps now at last, here in the sunset in Cassian’s home, he can stop running, and rest.

#star wars fic #my writing #Bodhi lives!#eventually also #rebelcaptain

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